Fashion, Fear and the Future
-Stephen McGowan
What will we look like in the future? What fashions will we wear then? What metaphorical clothes will the future wear? What, indeed, will that future look like?
In 1516, Sir Thomas More wrote about his vision of the future – coining the dream-name ‘Utopia’. He imagined, among many other wonders, a world where “health is a most sovereign pleasure”, a place where the hospitals are “so well appointed, and with all things necessary to health, so furnished” that anybody the least bit sick would admit themselves at once. We have arrived – today - at a place where even the citizens of the globe’s richest nation are left to die in the ‘natural disasters’ that flash across its land. Healthcare is available there, but only to those able to pay - credit card details taken before any treatment can be administered. We live in a world fuelled by technological and industrial ‘development’ - activity of a most furtive nature that in its self threatens the very stability of our home planet. And a planet that has recently reminded us of our minute stature, in comparison to its grand gestures.