Space-age enough for you? The dress, made from a liquid material, was sprayed from an aerosol can onto the body. The expelled fibres cross-link and adhere to create an instant, non-woven fabric.
Credit: Imperial College London/Fabrican Ltd/Ian Cole
The future. For some of us it's hover-cars, jetpacks and roast dinners in a pill. For others it's wise-cracking robot bartenders, underwater cities and casinos on the Moon.
Whatever your vision of the future, if popular culture is anything to go by, there's a good chance we'll all doing it while wearing the exact same thing: the monochrome one-piece jumpsuit. It appears in futuristic films such as Lost in Space, Battlefield Earth and Star Trek, to name just a few.
Sci-fi's predicted death of fashion is hard to miss. As Jerry Seinfeld says: "Anytime I see a movie or a TV show where there are people from the future or another planet, they're all wearing the same outfit. Somehow they all decided, 'All right, that's enough. From now on, this is going to be our outfit: one-piece silver jumpsuit with a V-stripe on the chest and boots. That's it. We're going to start visiting other planets and we want to look like a team.'"
It seems inevitable then. But why settle for Buck Rogers when you can have Buzz Lightyear?
Gone are the days when the most we can hope for is a simple silver one-piece that does little more than look good (and that's if we're lucky). Ahead of us is a time when functional fabrics become the norm, with everything from invisibility cloaks and fabrics that generate electricity to clothes you can hear.
Technological advances in textile research are starting to redefine the boundaries of fashion. "The field is growing fast and we have to remind ourselves that 10 years ago it was even thought that it would be impossible to hide an object," said Nicolas Stenger from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, one of the researchers working on invisibility cloaks.
Stegner's research involves making objects disappear using a three-dimensional (3-D) 'cloak' made from layered photonic crystals that can deflect the light around an object to make it invisible from the outside. The technology involves using this metamaterial - an artificial structure tailored to have special optical properties - to guide light waves around an object.
The researchers found that once an object is placed under the invisibility cloak, no matter what angle they observed it from, they saw nothing. "It's kind of like hiding a small object underneath a carpet - one will see the bump made in that carpet by the object underneath, but the cloak will make it appear flat again, as if there was no object under it," the researchers write in the journal Science.
But don't plan your cunning escapades just yet. So far, they have only produced a microscopic invisibility cloak the size of 100 microns by 30 microns to hide an object 10 times smaller than that, so the next step is to find a way to reproduce the technique on a larger scale.
"I think that maybe one day it will be possible to make someone invisible with clothes made of flexible metamaterials but before that you have to overcome some problems," said Stegner. "First you have to interact more strongly with the light to make a thin flexible invisibility cloaking cloth. Imagine that if we were able to make a cloak hiding a one-metre-high object, the cloak using our technique will have to be 26-metres-wide and 13-metres-high!"
But Stegner remains optimistic, "See what has already been done in these last 10 years in this field," he said. "Let's say that maybe we will see it sooner than expected."
While the Harry Potters of the world must wait patiently, technophiles could get their fix much earlier, with researchers in the U.S. releasing their Stress Outsourced (SOS) prototype earlier this year.
