A Tale of Two Spacesuits
Launch pads, booster rockets, moon rovers, Mission Control: these icons of the Space Age will pass into history when the Space Shuttle program comes to an end later this year. Of all the images the program will leave behind, none are more resonant than the images of space-suited astronauts standing on the surface of the moon — and in Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, Nicholas de Monchaux, an architecture professor at Berkeley, dives into the archives to find out how the world's most high-tech garment was imagined, designed, and manufactured. What he finds is surprising: When you think of the Apollo spacesuit, you probably think of it as a piece of technology, but it's also, Monchaux writes, a piece of couture. In fact, the Apollo spacesuits were designed and manufactured not by a defense contractor, but by the consumer clothing company Playtex. The company, famous for its underwear, drew on that expertise to design the 21-layer "A7L" spacesuit.
The spacesuit we know today, it turns out, might have been very different. Many NASA engineers envisioned a hard spacesuit made of metal. Moreover, they thought of the astronaut as a "cyborg": the idea was that cybernetic technologies would integrate the all-too-human astronaut into his heavily electronic spacesuit. A 1960 article in the New York Times, "Spaceman Is Seen as Man-Machine," promised an astronaut that "would not have to eat or breathe. Those functions and many others would be taken care of by drugs and battery-powered devices, some of which would be built directly into his body."
Alas, it was not to be. The hard suits NASA commissioned proved unwieldy, and the "cyborg" concept half-baked. In the end, a "soft suit" was designed by the International Latex Corporation (more widely known under its consumer brand-name, Playtex). Only Playtex could design a suit that both insulated the astronaut and conformed to the body. In fact, by the time of the Apollo missions, Playtex already had decades of experience designing close-fitting synthetic garments. The firm had made a fortune selling the girdles and other "foundation garments" women needed to wear the trim, "architectural" clothes popularized by Dior's "New Look" at the end of the 1940s. The manufacturer of the Apollo spacesuit in 1969, Monchaux writes, also manufactured "the most popular girdle of 1949."
Monchaux's book revels in these kinds of strange connections and surprising ironies. The rapidly changing world of the 1960s, with its revolutions in culture, technology, and fashion, was, he shows, saturated by a common hunger for the future, wherever and whatever it happened to be. The spacesuit, even as it was designed for utility, was also designed to signify that the future had arrived. In fact, the space program itself was born out of a reorganization of American military priorities under President Eisenhower which was known, in an official echo of Dior, as the "New Look in Defense Planning"; early spacesuits worn by NASA astronauts were army green or khaki in color, but covered in a thin silver fabric so that, in the words of NASA designers, they would look "glamorous," "like a spacesuit should — photogenic." "To justify it technically," one designer explains, "we can tell them this silver material is specifically designed to radiate heat or something." The spacesuit helped put men on the moon, but it also did symbolic work: it helped bring the future a little closer to the present.
