“Fashioning Apollo: Spacesuits, Cities, and How to Dress for Tomorrow”
A free public lecture by Nicholas de Monchaux, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UC Berkeley, part of the Creativity+Innovation series.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This talk is the story of those spacesuits. It is a story of the Playtex Corporation’s triumph over the military-industrial complex—a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.
