Litro137 teaser

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Future Fashions Featuring Claire Smith Ian Sales Ivor W. Hartmann Tosin Coker Ryan van Winkle Walé Oyéjidé Efe Tokunbo Ian Kelly

Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 44

Don’t live an ordinary life.

Discover The Happiness of Pursuit

by Chris Guillebeau, bestselling author of The $100 Startup

“As practical as it is inspiring” Brené Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Daring Greatly

LITRO MAGAZINE Issue 137 | September 2014

Claire Smith IMAGINING THE FUTURE

Ian Sales THE SPACEMAN AND THE MOON GIRL

Ivor W. Hartmann CATWALK

Tosin Coker THE PATH

05 09 12 15

Ryan van Winkle

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Walé Oyéjidé

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Efe Tokunbo

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Ian Kelly

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THAT WAS JOY SHE SAID

FROM SRI LANKA...

WITH LOVE

BABY LON AND IMP9000 GO TO MARKET AUTHOR Q&A

COVER ARTIST Mia Funk Mia Funk teaches at L’École de Dessin Technique et Artistique Sornas in Paris. She has participated in number of international juried competitions including the Salon d’Automne Paris, for which she won the Prix de Peinture 2009.

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Litro Magazine

Future Fashions

EDITORIAL Dear Reader, For the last hundred years, we have been constantly imagining—and reimagining—our destiny. Science fiction writers and directors have projected mankind into the future through new worlds, new cityscapes—and, of course, new fashions. The fashion industry has always looked to the future for inspiration, so it’s no surprise that designers have often been involved in creating these sci-fi visions. Jean-Paul Gaultier, Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin have all lent their visual style to the imagined societies we have seen on film. From Barbarella’s intergalactic beachwear to Katniss Everdeen’s combustible evening gown, fashion shapes the way we view mankind’s future.

As London Fashion Week brings the clothes of tomorrow to the catwalk, Litro #137 also puts science fiction’s Future Fashions in the spotlight. We celebrate some of the iconic designs of the last fifty years, and imagine where the fashion industry might end up in the near (or distant) future. We open with Imagining the Future by Claire Smith of the British Film Institute, examining the influence that costume design has had on science fiction films, from Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Kubrick’s masterpiece will be re-released to cinemas in a new digital transfer this November, as part of the BFI’s epic science fiction season, Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder—don’t miss out on this transcendent slice of future design.

Ian Sales explores many of the same themes in his story The Spaceman and the Moon Girl, taking us back to a time when mankind looked to the stars for inspiration. The worlds of science and fashion collided during the 1969 moon landings, as that era’s designers took their inspiration from NASA’s ambitious space program. Ivor W. Hartmann beams us into the far future with Catwalk, examining the toll the fashion industry takes from its models; then Tosin Coker unveils a world

in which clothes have become more than simple garments, in her novel extract The Path. Ryan van Winkle imagines a future in which nudity is the new haute couture, in his poem that was joy she said, a modern take on the Emperor’s new clothes. This is followed by a short travelogue from the future, From Sri Lanka…With Love, by fashion designer Walé Oyéjidé, before Efe Tokunbo explores similar territory in Baby Lon and Imp9000 go to Market. Tokunbo’s story is a hi-tech shopping trip in which individuality—and freedom— come with a price tag.

Finally, we chat with acclaimed biographer Ian Kelly about his latest project, working side-by-side with designer Vivienne Westwood on her much-anticipated biography. There are few fashion designers as iconic as Westwood, and Kelly was given unprecedented access to her friends, her family—and Vivienne herself—as he researched her remarkable life story.

For anyone who has an interest in fashion, punk, or simply the British cultural icons of the last fifty years, this is a book you won’t want to miss.

As the world’s models take to London’s catwalks this September, wearing many of the designs and the fabrics that we will see around us for the next few years, I can’t help humming lines from Lady Gaga’s ‘Fashion’: “There's a life on Mars/ Where the couture is beyond, beyond/Fashion”. From space age fabrics to dazzling near-future designs, fashion has always had one foot planted at the furthest reaches of the human imagination. The Space Race may have stalled, but our designers continue to reach for the stars.

Dan Coxon Editor September 2014

IMAGINING THE FUTURE Film fashions have boldly gone where no-one has gone before

by Claire Smith Film has always been entranced by the cosmic and the infinite, leading to an enduring love affair with futuristic design, art and fashion. In the late nineteenth century, stage performer Loïe Fuller first united cloth and light to conjure up an out-of-this-world vision in her dazzling lantern dances, complete with projections of the moon’s surface across her body.

The films of Georges Méliès introduced into cinematic clothing the elements of fantasy and transformation, including a journey to outer space in A Trip to the Moon (1902). The celestial and the lunar were popular subjects in early projections, while even the technologies themselves exerted a powerful hold on the imagination. Designing, building and using them was a key aspect of imagining a future world.

For fashion designers, cinema opened up a world of new opportunities.

Spectacular visions of the future ignited a trend for imitative designs. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) sent ripples through the fashion world that can still be felt to this day on the catwalks of Givenchy and Versace, while Maurice Elvey’s High Treason (1929) immortalised the fashion aspirations of the Jazz Age generation. The film, set twenty-one years into the future in a politically volatile London (prophetically on the verge of a second World War), presents a sleek metropolitan vision intended to rival that of Lang. Some of these ideas have stayed with us (such as the Channel Tunnel), others proved less successful. But with sumptuous costumes designed by Gordon Conway, who began her career as an illustrator for Vogue and Harpers, a nightclub scene presented one of the first, great futuristic fashion sequences on film. Conway loved to work with fabrics analogous to film, from diaphanous chiffons to light-refracting American cloth. Metallic and coated fabrics shimmered on screen, leading eager eyes to the subtleties of cut and construction.

The costumes reference the flapper craze of the 1920s and the 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, which were themselves informed by the vampish severity and exoticism of silent film stars such as Gloria Swanson and Theda Bara, and magazines stressed the role of film in dictating this look. In 1920’s edition of Photoplay, May Stanley declared, “stars of the silent drama are not content with following the fashions, they introduce them.” So “when Alice Brady or Priscilla Dean or Norma Talmadge want to appear in winter things in a new film play they get next winter’s modes from the creators, who are always six months ahead of the styles, and you get them as soon as the picture is released.” These figures were promoted as trendsetters—leaders in sartorial experimentation and freedom—and they found a natural ally on the catwalks of couturiers. Coco Chanel, who would herself design for film in the early 1930s, championed the uncorseted silhouette and sporting lines that would be taken up by tomorrow’s physically and socially emancipated woman.

Fashion, by its very nature, is always looking ahead. Trend forecasting has played an integral role in the fashion world since colour prediction was Future Fashions, September 2014 | 05

THE SPACEMAN AND THE MOON GIRL An astronaut’s wife watches from the sidelines

by Ian Sales He sits with eighteen of his peers in a room at the Manned Spacecraft Center while reporters launch questions, most of which could be answered by referring to the press releases NASA has handed out; and he’s wearing his best suit, it’s served him well for several years, the best he can afford on his USAF captain’s salary although he’d much rather be wearing a flight suit or maybe his Air Force service dress, but NASA were clear on the protocol and four of the guys are civilians anyway. So he’s trying to show he has the Right Stuff coming out the wazoo, because there’s not just the other guys in Group 5 but the Mercury guys and the astronaut groups NASA picked in ‘62, ‘63 and ‘65, and he knows he’s going to be compared to them just as much as he will be to the guys sitting up here with him on the dais...

He’s there in the “barrel” and his wife, she’s back in New York, because this was not an assignment she could turn down, not unless she wanted bookers and editors to “forget” her face; so she’s one of half a dozen models striking poses and swallowing insults from a photographer with an ego the size of the Moon because Vogue is doing a feature on Pierre Cardin and his space age designs. She thinks briefly on her husband, and maybe he’s going to the Moon like the President said—and that’s kind of ironic because two years before she modelled for André Courrèges’ “Moon Girl” collection—but at another barked order from the photographer she’s back in herself, and she’s not going to forget it—the metallic silver Lurex tights are scratchy, the long vinyl gloves are sticky under the hot lights, the blue “Cardine” dress with its pattern moulded into the fabric like a goddamn eggbox—they say Cardin invented the material with Union Carbide—the dress is heavy though it hangs beautifully, the black vinyl high-heeled boots are just as hot as the gloves, and the hat, or whatever the hell it is, more like a bonnet, she can feel the brim of it tight across her forehead; but at least she’s not wearing the one that looks like an upturned bucket. Despite all that, she does feel kind of space age and she can imagine a future where she might wear these clothes while her husband goes to work in outer space.

And that night, she gets a phone call from her husband and he wants her in Houston to set up home, because NASA is all super-family and wives are wives first and nothing else second, unless they have kids, in which case they’re mothers too. He’s picked out a plot of land on Nassau Bay and he wants her there to find a contractor and oversee building the house while he’s at the Cape training to be an astronaut. They fight. She has a career to think of, they agreed she could do this until they were ready to start a family—and she privately accepts she’s delayed that start time after time— and if he can go and strap himself to a rocket and get blasted into space, she doesn’t see why suddenly he has a goddamn problem with her appearing in Vogue and McCall’s and Harper’s Bazaar...

He’ll win, she’s known from the beginning he will win, and in defeat she belatedly realises that all along he “allowed” her this last year in New York because he was so busy with his secret project, that Mach 3 fighter jet, back at Edwards AFB. But that’s all over, that’s all done; and now? Now he’s an astronaut.

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CATWALK A model finds her moment in the spotlight

by Ivor W. Hartmann This was Chiedza’s first catwalk and she was pregnant with anxiety. The roar of the crowd like a thousand bees in her brain pummelled through the skin curtains leading to the great hall and the runway that bisected it.

“Chiedza! You’re on in two!” yelled Bardinko in her ear link; an apoplectic little man who ran the backstage and seemed to always be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

“You’ll be just fine Chiedza, you’re gorgeous,” said Mamewata, with a big smile and hug.

Mamewata, a long time model, had taken Chiedza under her wing when she first arrived. Those months that seemed like aeons of indescribable pain and suffering, her own private hell into which Mamewata had appeared like an occasional angel giving her the strength to hang on. How far she had come. Just eight months ago she was still in her village in the Dande valley of Zimbabwe, now here she was in Paris, on the first day of fashion week.

“In one Chiedza!”

She took her place beside the curtain, and was sure she’d have been sweating like Mosi-oa-Tunya from her armpits if she had been able to sweat there anymore. She thought of her family, knowing they’d all be together in the kitchen hut now watching the live 3D projection of the fashion show, waiting for her to come on. Would they understand, she wondered, or more pertinently would they even be able to recognise her, so great was her transformation.

The usual hunger pangs stabbed—oh how she pined for the special occasion Sadza ne Nyama her family would be eating right now from big bowls in the middle of the table—yet, the thought of eating more of the tasteless goop she’d been eating for weeks made her feel downright nauseous.

“Thirty seconds Chiedza!”

A red warning sign popped up in her vision, and she permitted her body system to administer a cocktail of beta-blockers. She felt a warm wave of calmness wash over her and embraced it fully.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the moment we’ve all been waiting for! Introducing, the last and greatest creation this season by Designer Gabony of the House of ChanDior!” bellowed the presenter, and the crowd roared to a new bonetrembling high tide.

“Chiedza! Go, go, go!”

And she did, much to her surprise, straight through the curtains and down the catwalk.

12 | Litro Magazine

THE PATH

An exclusive extract from ‘The Chronicles of Zauba’ah'

by Tosin Coker “Hygiene facilities are to the left. That includes a garment refresher. Please hold out your wrist for Behavioural Implant insertion.” The penal processor android was deliberately programmed to be void of empathy.

Savant felt a wave of relief that was interrupted before he had a chance to fully grant it an accompanying sigh.

“P-1, did I hear correctly?” a female voice queried from a speaker in the wall behind the android. “Did you just affirm the being you are processing, to be Qheltarian?”

“Minshar Peebi, that is correct. Male Qheltarian, shetznu: Savantesmemtaqinah-Imhotep.”

Savant’s heart sank to his toes at hearing the title, ‘Minshar’. Of all places to be sent to. His tactical indiscretion was now far from tactful or discrete.

A doorway formed out of the smooth matte silver wall, and a mature homyndau stepped through with a look of disbelief that quickly changed to disapproval. She wore a crème coloured seamless, sleeveless jumpsuit with a two by three inch grey panel across the middle of her chest. At the top right corner of the panel there was a white triangle light. She tapped it quickly and it instantly dimmed. Savant guessed it must have been a recording device and was grateful for her having switched it off.

“Never did I expect to see a Qheltarian pass through this institution.” Peebi looked at the armband that covered his companionship marking and stamped her foot irritably. “Please tell me that is not what I think it is! Did I not hear that your arrest was for fornicating with a government official’s mate?”

Savant held his head low. Of all the penal facilities...“I didn’t know she was bound in companionship...” He instantly realised that he had been mistaken; the Qheltarian female before him was not homyndau, she was shetznu. The way she leaped across the counter and dragged him by his ear into an empty private interview room reminded him of his own Minshar.

Why oh why of all correctional facilities was he placed in this one? As Peebi slapped the wall for the doorway to seamlessly merge back into it, it dawned on him that the government official must have known crossing paths with this female would be more punishment than the time spent being indoctrinated about the planet’s laws, for the sake of sitting a release test.

“Did you also not know that you were bound in companionship?” Peebi growled. Great, she was a predator type. Well suited to working with the most unsavoury of criminals. There was no point trying to charm her.

“Show me your lineage markings this sub-par degree!”

“No, please...” Savant ceased pleading and quickly turned around as she raised her hand and claws emerged from her fingertips.

Qheltarian garments were traditionally made with a translucent panel down the spine for the purpose of allowing their lineage markings to be shown off. Markings were tattoos that were an intricate part of Qheltarian culture.

They detailed the name of the wearer’s parents, their position in the family, the names of siblings—if any—as well as their own name, creature form and type.

Future Fashions, September 2014 | 15

Future Fashions, September 2014 | 21

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THAT WAS JOY SHE SAID A future trend turns its back on clothes

by Ryan van Winkle when people began wearing their own skin like it was a scarf, a fur there were the Olds who stared or spit on our bare thighs milk-like cappuccino froth in our Tangle yet, we opened we strut & showed we were flawed flowers all and that was joy, she said she liked the red razor scars of girth they felt hot, his low breasts exulted as individuals, his third snowflake nipple, everything you ever love gets old will fray, die so be decadent in Human Paisley, they wrote

Ryan van Winkle is a poet, live artist, podcaster and critic living in Edinburgh. His first collection, Tomorrow, We Will Live Here, was published

by Salt in 2010 and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, AGNI, Poetry New Zealand, Poetry Daily and Prairie Schooner.

He is a regular contributor to the Prairie Schooner blog and was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson fellowship in 2012. He is also the host and co-producer of the arts podcast The Multi-Coloured Culture Laser and the poetry podcast for the Scottish Poetry Library. Find his website at www.ryanvanwinkle.com Future Fashions, September 2014 | 23

Photo: Philip Asbury 24 | Litro Magazine

FROM SRI LANKA...

WITH LOVE Revenge is served cold in New Colombo

by Walé Oyéjidé I’d gone to bed in Hong Kong. A night full of regrets. And a do-not-disturb sign left swinging grimly from my hotel room door-knob like the newly hoisted frame of a young Southerner who had been seen cavorting with the wrong woman in the wrong era of American history.

I awoke unceremoniously, and without room-service, in the boot of a trans-mobile in New Colombo, Sri Lanka. Teleportation usually induces its share of nausea, but given the deluge of Pre-Collapse whiskey I’d imbibed the night before, it was little surprise I hadn’t noticed my molecules being wrenched apart and begrudgingly re-assembled a few thousand miles away. After all, who doesn’t feel that way after a few pints too many?

Like an indigent pharaoh, I shared my sarcophagus with aged-produce and still-clucking wildlife that looked less impressed with the present company than I was. Outside, the horns of tuk-tuks screamed as the three-legged chariots contorted past each other in anorexic spaces. Above, enterprising drones turned their lenses downward, as their split-second facial recognition algorithms beamed curated-commercials to every pedestrian foolhardy enough to look upwards for a view that once included the sun. Higher still, crows screeched through the city spires, their cackles simultaneously heralding my arrival and announcing my impending demise.

I had been imprisoned just long enough to begin thinking of my newly acquired lodgings as a quaint Airbnb studio in a freshly-gentrified borough of New York City, when the ceiling receded above me. First, there was a searing white. Then, the sort of smog-tinged grey that seemed impossibly blue because I had come to accept that I’d never see the sky again. Finally, they came. I saw their hands first. Only three out of four of their palms appeared to be made of flesh. A point I’m sure no one was bold enough to inquire about during cocktail party introductions.

The two of them plucked overgrown fruit and overwrought animals out of the trunk with the finesse of unsupervised baggage handlers at your favourite warp-space airline. I was an after-thought. Like the masks they hadn’t bothered to wear, for obvious reasons that related to my increasingly shortening life-span and inability to be a future witness.

While dragging me through a reasonably well-travelled alley in Pettah Market, they made small talk in Tamil...or Sinhalese...or something that I now regret not learning because I’d been promised my phone’s translation app would guide me through any shopping negotiations I might encounter. Unfortunately, it hadn’t occurred to the designers that the enduser might need to bargain to buy back his own life. Saris and sarongs Future Fashions, September 2014 | 25

BABY LON AND IMP9000 GO TO MARKET Teenage rebellion in a genetically-modified future

by Efe Tokunbo Baby Lon loved butterflies. She wanted butterfly wings more than anything else in the whole wide world but her parents wouldn’t allow it.

“What do you need grafts for anyway?” her father had asked, “your new robot, the imp, it can fly right?”

“It’s not the same daddy. I want to really fly, you know, not be carried by a robot. I’ll pay for it myself but I need your permission to get them.”

“Well, you can forget it missy. Anyway what’s the difference between flying with the imp or with butterfly wings?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Baby said petulantly.

“What? Some kind of hip fashion statement? Look at me, my soul is fragile, touch me and I’ll crumble to dust?”

“Honey,” Baby’s mother had interjected, “don’t make fun of her like that.”

“Who’s making fun? You remember that kid on the news who grafted snakes to replace his dreadlocks? His girlfriend dumped him and when he became depressed the snakes bit him to death. I mean what kind of irresponsible human being grafts poisonous snakes onto a teenager’s head? I love you Baby, but no member of the Lon family is getting a graft.

Not while you’re under my roof, is that clear?”

“It’s not as if I could anyway with that robot following me everywhere” “What!? You know how many kids would kill to have their own imp9000?

Part bodyguard, part butler, part jetpack...all in one sleek package powered by a level III A.I. Of all the ungrateful...”

“But it never lets me do what I want to do!”

“Well that’s because it obeys the law, honey, and the things that you like to do are against the law. Now finish your dinner then do your homework.

Butterfly wings indeed...”

It was true, Baby was criminally-minded. The Lons were an affluent middle class family yet at the age of fifteen, Baby had been arrested on multiple occasions for a variety of offences ranging from burning down her school’s cafeteria to shoplifting a crossbow to assaulting a peace officer.

In despair, her father had purchased the imp9000 several months prior.

She hadn’t gotten in any trouble since but this was merely on the surface of things. Like the butterfly she so admired, Baby had morphed into Future Fashions, September 2014 | 27

AUTHOR Q&A Biographer Ian Kelly talks to Litro about working alongside Vivienne Westwood

with Ian Kelly Litro: How did you come to work with Vivienne Westwood on her new biography? How much did you know about her before you started?

Ian: The simplest answer to how and why Vivienne and I are in bed together co-writing her autobiography is that I wrote a few years back a biography of Beau Brummell, the Regency dandy and begetter of modern men’s tailoring. Vivienne and her husband Andreas had read this and I was invited to come and meet her at her studio, and so began a long conversation about fashion, politics, art...and biography. But as it happened I had met her before, briefly, and have long admired her work. And when people used to ask me who was the modern ‘Beau Brummell’ I would sometimes refer to Vivienne. So we joke that we met in the 18th century. But I was fascinated also by punk.

Litro: How did your preparation and your working method differ from your other books, since you were working alongside a living subject?

Ian: I’ve before this only written historical biography, but the process was not so very different in that I spent a lot of time reading around the subject—the fashions of the late 20th century, the social history around the punk movement, this is all ‘history’ now but wonderfully so many of the people who shaped the periods I have been writing about, and who worked with Vivienne or knew her, are alive and kicking and were very welcoming and helpful with my questions. But yes, I learned to use a tape recorder, and I have had to have discussions with lawyers and that’s all new to someone used to 18th century archives. But more than the colourful insights into Vivienne and her world from her eclectic coterie of friends (everyone from Pamela Anderson to Prince Charles to Shami Chakrabarti to Debbie Harry) it was humbling to sit with Vivienne for weeks together re-drafting the book with her added comments and corrections. I found myself wishing I had been able to do that with previous biographical subjects. It was very exposing for her in some ways: that taught me a lot about the arrogance of biographers and the vulnerability of the biographical subject.

Litro: The fashion industry can be a cutthroat, and secretive, business.

How much was she willing to share with you, and how much did you have to dig out yourself?

Ian: Vivienne is remarkably candid and unconcerned about opinion around her, and this is reflected in the openness of those around her, those she has Future Fashions, September 2014 | 37

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief: Eric Akoto Magazine Editor: Dan Coxon dan.coxon@litro.co.uk General Online Editor : Eric Akoto Online Short Fiction Editor: Katy Darby katy.darby@litro.co.uk Online Fiction Editor: Lia Martin onlinefiction@litro.co.uk Non-Fiction Editor: Bella Reid nonfiction@litro.co.uk Book Reviews Editor: Inder Sidhu inder.sidhu@litro.co.uk Arts Editor: Daniel Janes arts@litro.co.uk Film & Arts Editor: Robin McConnell filmreviews@litro.co.uk Contributing Editors at large: Sophie Lewis, Rio, Brazil Lead Designer: Laura Hannum Marketing & Sales: info@litro.co.uk

Litro Magazine is published by Ocean Media Books Ltd. General inquiries: contact info@litro.co.uk or call 020 3371 9971.

Litro Magazine believes literary magazines should not just be targeted at writers themselves, or even those with a particular interest in literature, instead Litro believes in reaching the general reader whether they be a commuter, someone browsing in bookshop or in a bar or cafĂŠ to meet a friend.

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www. l ocand a o t t o e me z z o.c o.u k

Future Fashions LITRO|137 She glided along the catwalk, naked, twelve feet tall with limbs so slender it seemed physically impossible she could be upright or walking. Her skin was a velvet blackness that absorbed all light and reflected none, giving high contrast to an iridescent oil slick rainbow tattoo that flowed over her body.

From Catwalk by Ivor W. Hartmann Cover Art: Escape by Mia Funk www.litro.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

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