A Future Hiding in Plain Sight

On the left is an outfit designed in 1939 for Vogue magazine in conjunction with the World’s Fair by one of the leading industrial designers of the time, Gilbert Rohde. The outfit of Rohde’s Man of Tomorrow was a vision of how a marriage of apparel design and industrial design could address the projected needs of the future. On the right is a photograph dated 1882 of two miners in California, wearing Levi’s blue jeans and what looks like chambray work shirts and henleys.

While participating in a workshop on apparel innovation, I showed a slide of these two images. We had spent the day exploring how we interact with our clothes, how we move and travel, what we carry, how that will change in the future. To the group, I posed the question: of the two images, one of an outfit designed by a leading industrial designer of the early 20th century, the other of two miners in the work wear standards of a century and a quarter ago, who are most of us in this room dressed like?

If only I had been in a room filled with folks wearing antenna hats, but alas it was latter.

Admittedly, it is a bit of an unfair comparison. The 19th century miners were wearing clothes designed for what were existing, immediate and tangible needs, specifically around durability. Rohde was designing for an imagined future. In many ways, Rohde was quite prescient, but ultimately it was clothing designed to meet the needs of miners that became relevant for meeting the needs in most people’s daily lives despite that fact that most people are not miners. Even though Dieter Rams was not around when the five pocket blue jean was designed, it is one of the best examples of his Ten Principles of Good Design. The design of the five pocket blue jean is also an example of clearly understanding the problem(s) that you are designing a solution for.

I am, of course, oversimplifying the design of the blue jean. The end result, what we now know today as the five pocket blue jean, was the product of a process and an evolution, demonstrating another principle that a consumer feedback loop can be a driver of good design. This last idea runs counter to the often cited Henry Ford quote, “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” which I actually think was a misnomer on Mr. Ford’s part, having not invented the automobile, nor the gas combustion engine, nor the assembly line. Ford doesn’t give the people enough credit. Asked what they wanted in 1908, a more accurate response probably would have been, “cheaper automobiles and better roads.”

Predicting the future is a difficult and often futile prospect, but shaping the future is an action we particpate in daily. Consumer decisions constitute an Occam’s Razor that whittles designer’s visions down to simple truths, right or wrong, tasteful or gaudy. In the words of Benton and Bowles, “if it doesn’t sell, it’s not creative.”