Brave New Mode

Huxley’s fashion sense lit up Brave New World. Catchy phrases that everyone used, clothing styles that made a statement, vacations that were en vogue…the world of the future reflected on the roaring twenties and the sensibilities of The Great Gatsby were projected hundreds of years forward.

Again using our incisively clear hindsight, we can see where Huxley was going with fashion. New materials were being produced in Huxley’s time and his future clothing would don many of the trendiest accoutrements of the day in clever implementations. Zippers were everywhere in his Brave New World and this is understandable. They were extant during his time but hardly commonplace…especially beyond the dress back or trouser fly. In Huxley’s vision, you’d see them up the sides of short-shorts and on various other garment locations that were uncommon in his time. There was no way to know when the book came out in 1932 that the eighties would produce the parachute pant with its cleverly placed lengthwise zippers up the entire outer leg.

Beyond the many fashion predictions, Aldous Huxley saw a new set of hip words emerging in his future world. The new descriptor for the well-shaped female form: pneumatic. Works for me…airy, hmm, yes inflated in all the right places…I see what Huxley intended with this one. Aside from pneumatic, he also had a vast set of new terms and initials. With all of the science in place to shape society, there are for more lettered terms than I can retell here. Some were for medicines, others for conditioning treatments, and social status took the form of alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon with a plus or minus tacked on for more refined definitions. In our computer age, Huxley’s foresight has come to be and we live now in that age of abbreviations, acronyms and initials.

Finally, there is always the vacation fashion of the era. Most recently, we’re all going off to a "time share." In the twenties it was the hippest vacation liner. Huxley noticed society's vacation fashion sense and employed discussions of trips to the desert, for example, to see Savages as an edgy option for vacationers. It’s an esoteric aspect of society that he comments upon reflecting on a trend of his own time. I’ve noticed the varying fashionable vacation shifts in my two-score-plus years but I always assumed it to be part of the fast-changing era in which I live. Not so…patently wrong. These trendy vacation shifts were obviously swooshing around society through Huxley’s years as well.

There are a plethora of fashion statements in Brave New World. I’m just scratching the surface here. If you like social commentary, then this is indeed the book for you.