For a while, Pavel Chekov, a crew member in the original Star Trek series, had the worse comb-over in television and those of us who noticed, could not help but wonder that twenty-third century technologies could produce warp drives but had no solution to bad hair days! While some of the most egregious fashion errors were made by the stylists and designers in that series, awful, tasteless and silly designs may be found in generations of Sci-Fi television shows. When conceptualized and created, the hair styles and clothing worn by actors in science fiction television seem, for the most part, to express concepts and visions of the future and perhaps to explicate the contemporaneous social conditions in which they were produced. But some fashions displayed in Sci-Fi television seem, at first, to be no more than fashion accidents. Do they suggest conflicting realities or just awful design? This presentation considers various fashion faux pas in Sci-Fi television series as a window for exploration of intentional and unintentional meaning and of the prevailing folkways at the time of their creation.
About the presenterRoberta Brody
Roberta Brody is interested in serial storytelling and in material culture especially as represented in personal and institutional collections. When not occupied with serialized stories in various media and arts practice as research, she makes artists’ books and actively collects commercial pop-up and movable books.