The Concept of Time-Travel and Dress

One of the main inspirations - or rather, the main inspiration, for the concept of zero-era clothing is the idea of what to wear in the event of traveling through time.

Mainly, time-travelers depicted in fiction are from the distant future, and give little care to their appearance, dressing in "futuristic" garb that is supposedly what people wear in 3207 or whatever.

"We've come to warn you about filthy perverts...
uh, and nuclear war!"

Time-travelers in the "present" sometimes have a technology that automatically changes their clothes with time they are visiting, but more often they have to dress up before they go.

This presents us with a difficult dichotomy. When visiting the past, should we pay no heed to the dress of the time, and arrive glaringly obvious as visitors from either the distant future or some advanced planet, or should we stock up on a warehouse of costumes in order to fit in perfectly with the era we plan to go to?

"Yo, meez and my mate just stepped off tha, ya know,
tempral booth or whatever and I bumped me noggin',
can you up-and-down me with that beepin' healin' deal?"

While the silver v-cut jumpsuit might work in, say, the 1950's when Western culture suspected this might be what people wear when they come from the future to warn the present of future dangers and such, such garb would quite possibly get you burned at the stake in the 1200's.

Similarly, when visiting the future, should we wear the clothing of our time, guarantying instant recognition as "pasties," or try and guess what people of the future would wear?

Considering these quandaries led me to the concept of Zero-Era Fashion; ie. "Clothing out of time." A very difficult proposition, indeed, but probably the only real solution for time-traveling garb.

Zero-era clothing can be obtained through ignoring popular fashion trends and looking at relative constants in dress throughout history. I will delve deeper into what this are over the course of this blog, but suffice it to say that such constants exist and can be exploited and built upon.

While as a time-traveler it is inherent that you will "stick out" to some degree. This can be used as a benefit when dressing. Instead of dressing to the nines of what the era dictated as high fashion, wearing what the commoners wore (which changes little throughout most of Western history) with a little added flair and style will garner you little notice and if it does, you will most likely be seen as someone of modest wealth who is not keen on dressing up.

I would like to add, as well, as the idea of zero-era fashion is not just a fictional concept for answering the question of "what to wear" when time-traveling; no, it is also a statement against the constant and unrelenting commercialization and fetishizing of clothing. Whereas fashion trends used to last 5, 10, even 50-100 years, we now see a complete upheaval of trends every single year, or even every season.

Zero-era clothing can be seen as a constant in the face of a changing (but not evolving) fashion world. It is a statement against fashion as a commodity and as something predetermined by some invisible hand (the "scenes" of New York, Paris and London).

This doesn't mean, however, that it abandons fashion or style or design. Indeed, aesthetic appeal is crucial and aside from protection and warmth, is the only reason humans wear clothes. Clothing is woven deeply into every culture, and carries cultural constructs and ideologies with it. This is not an attempt to straight-jacket fashion, merely protest against it and its combination of stagnation, built-in obsolesence and ridiculous dictates. Zero-Era clothing should look good -- damn good! It accomplishes this by tying the past, present and future together into a coherent and subtle style.

I will attempt to further define these ideas later, but for now I just wanted to make a post about how the idea of zero-era came about: time travel. And seriously, who wouldn't want to dress like a time traveler?