Space Clothes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
In the future, swimsuits with shoulder pads and shiny pajamas shall display your wealth and status.

"Captain, get out your spandex suit. We're sending you on a space journey."

—Spore

There are a few types of clothes people wear when they are traveling in space:

Today, Space Clothes seem to be largely a thing of the past, as everyone goes military-style or contemporary. The problem with the latter is that people may well not wear those sorts of things in the future.

See also Future Spandex. Compare Spandex, Latex, or Leather.

Examples of Space Clothes include:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

  • Kryptonians in flashbacks to Krypton in the Superman comics usually wear some variation of space clothes, especially in Golden Age and Silver Age depictions of Krypton.
  • In one The Flash storyline, Wally thinks his cousins, who grew up in the 30th century, have followed in the family tradition, since they're wearing superhero costumes. Nope - that's just how people in the 30th century dress.


Film

  • Dune the movie managed to come up with one set of strange clothes, thanks to the really weird mind of David Lynch, along with particular distinctive physical quirks (Mentats have giant eyebrows, the Spacing Guild are all bald and have weird voices, Harkonnens are red-haired and have terrible acne). The miniseries reveals its low budget by distinguishing people...by their hats. Children of Dune was slightly better about this, as the budget was a mote higher. The Atreides and the Emperor seem to constantly wear military uniforms in the film. Justified with the Emperor, whose fetish for uniforms was mentioned in the books.
  • Star Trek
  • Star Wars
    • Everybody in the galaxy far, far away has a fantastical design to their clothing. Upper class citizens dress in primary colors, and often some sort of robe. Middle to lower class dress in contemporary clothes, but often bulkier (or just dull robes similar to Jedi). Han Solo dresses like a gunslinger, and then of course we have the Jedi Robes, which are based on monks. Most species belonging that can be called a Green-Skinned Space Babe wear Stripperific clothing, or just generally skimpy.
    • Padme Amidala wears particularly improbable clothing, though it's influenced by actual Mongolian and Russian royal fashion.
  • Space Mutiny: the men have space clothes, most women wear Stripperiffic outfits.
  • Starship Invasions features quite a few variations of Space Clothes, from tinfoil bikinis to the bad guys' goofy shapeless hat/hood things.
  • The Fifth Element has a plethora of clothing made out of plastic and rubber. Luc Besson and Milla Jovovich have connections to the fashion industry, so the costumes were designed by Jean-Paul Gaultier and worn by a number of runway models, including Jovovich herself.
  • Project Moonbase. United States Space Force astronauts dress casually in shorts, tops and tight-fitting skullcaps (presumably to stop one's hair floating about in zero-gravity).
  • Parodied in Bill and Teds Bogus Journey, where people from Rufus's time wear ridiculously huge boots made of what looks like foam packing material. Yes, the Big Bad even dresses his Mooks like this, but all in black so they'll look scary.
  • Played for laughs in Dude, Where's My Car with the followers of Zoltan, whose "interstellar jumpsuits" are hoodies made of bubble wrap. The aliens, though, wear tight-fitting leather.
  • Future fashion in Back to The Future Part II tended towards ridiculously silly.
  • The original Flash Gordon serials set the standard for "Space Clothes" back in the '30s. The Movie turned it Up to Eleven.


Literature

  • Guaranteeing that his Adept series will never be ruined by Hollywood, Piers Anthony averted this trope by having almost everyone on Planet Proton walk around naked.
  • Everyone's nekkid in the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs... Understandably, this aspect never came up in the film adaptation.
  • Toyed with in an H.P. Lovecraft story taking place in the wet jungles of a pulp Venus. The planet-hopping protagonist grouses in his diary about his sturdy leather suit, wishing for something made of indestructible shiny metal foil instead.
  • Known Space has its own fashions: from the very popular nudists (since everything is climatized in the future - obviously they also found a way of getting around the hygiene problems) to full-body pigment changes in weird-ass colours, and the Belter fashion of individualized spacesuits - and LARPers.
  • Robert Heinlein describes some pretty amazing future fashion in his books. Aside from removing all social taboos about nudity, his female clothes got skimpier and skimpier. In I Will Fear No Evil, he describes an entire fashion trend made of nothing but see through skirts and body paint. Men's fashions frequently included kilts, and occasionally mentioned jewelry and even cosmetics (which is not without historical precedent, of course).
  • Asimov's The Bicentennial Man, each new time period that protagonist lives through is introduced with a description of the current fashion. Most of the new clothing styles looks pretty silly to modern eyes (transparent clothing for women and tube top for men, really?).
  • Jumpsuits seem to be the default garment of choice for humans in the Humanx Commonwealth series.
  • Edmond Hamilton may have pulled out all the stops with his descriptions of Shining Cities and weird alien planets but the clothing worn in his Space Operas are simple and comfortable tunics and leggings or sleeveless shirts, trousers and capes, emblazoned in the case of Star Kings with suitable heraldic symbols in jewels.
  • The illustrations of old pulp science fiction stories are a combination of this and a bunch of other tropes, depending on who was drawing it. This image, for example, is a cross between 1950s ideas of space clothes with women wearing pseudo-medieval witch clothes.
  • In the Royal Manticoran Navy the uniform is black and gold with a berret. Apparently a saucer cap with brim(like a modern military or constabulary dress cap) was popular in the past as the hero, Edward Saginami is broadcasted wearing it, much as the ghost of Stephen Decatur no doubt walks around Annapolis in cocked hat and epaulettes telling good brimmed-cap Middies to be brave when beating up Barbary Pirates but not to get killed in duels like he did, or whatever he would be doing.
  • In Vorkosigan Saga There are a number of uniforms. Imperial full-dress red and blue is only worn for the most formal of court and parade functions. Every Count has his own colors for his family and retainers but Vorkosigan family is Brown and Silver(naturally some counts come in late when all the best contrasts are drawn and get rather unappealing ones). The Dendarii Mercenaries wear a rather mundane grey. Cetagandans are naturally rather unusual in their clothing, having all sorts of weird arrangements especially for court dress which is gaudy enough on Barrayar.

Live-Action TV

  • During the "Time Capsule" Showcases on The Price Is Right, the models would wear this type of costume as they revealed prizes to the theme songs of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and the disco version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
  • Blakes Seven. Just watch Jenna and Cally go down to rescue the boys in 'Star One' clad in floor length skirts and six inch heels. And then there was Avon's fondness for leather and studs...
  • Zaphod Beeblebrox wears a suit apparently made of dayglo circuit boards in TV version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
    • Well, he was voted "Worst Dressed Sentient Being in the Universe" seven times running...
      • It's good to know they paid such attention to detail.
  • Babylon 5 had its humans wearing military uniforms - proper uniforms with pockets, not pyjamas - or things like suit jackets with the lapels missing or oddly-cut and collarless shirts (it looks kind of contemporary, but at the same time kind of foreign). The Minbari and the Narn, on the other hand, play this to the hilt.
    • Played for laughs, when Zach is being fitted for a new uniform and mocks the Minbari fashion sense.
      • Though in fact that is human style and Minbari material.
    • Minbari clothes manage to look well while looking alien at the same time. Delenn wears robes of several colors (often emphasizing the purple)but the thick shoulder pads, almost like epaulettes make it look alien at the same time. She of course looks quite well in them because Everything's Better With Satais. Being the gloriously proper Lady of War that she is she can go through a Space Battle without disturbing her appearance one bit.
      • Word of God says that Minbari have a system of headbone heraldry; for instance Minbari females carefully carve their headbones while Warrior caste let them grow rough in appearance, and religious caste presumably have their own style. This justifies Delenn's headbone which looks suspiciously like a circlet.
    • And let's not get started on the Centauri ...
  • In the 1970's British Series UFO (set in the future world of 1980) silver bodysuits are standard wear for space personnel (though interceptor pilots wear blue, with white plastic belts and boots). The Moonbase Bridge Bunnies also wore their trademark purple wigs, elaborate make-up, and cosmetic belt-kits (as seen in this famous scene which seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a ten minute coffee break... A non-canon explanation for the purple wigs was that they prevented static electricity on Moonbase, but that didn't explain why the men didn't wear them. But that wasn't as strange as the Skydiver personnel who wore fishnet shirts that showed off their nipples. Even the women!
  • The original Battlestar Galactica generally averted this, with a muted beige colour scheme and some pretty spiffing Wild West-style jackets, complete with cowboy-style ammo belts. The capes and thigh boots were much harder to take seriously, however.
  • Farscape costumes started out pretty racy already, and eventually evolved into All Fetish Fuel All The Time. (Nobody complained.)
  • Civilian clothes in Next Gen-era Star Trek are mostly Space Clothes done right — easy on contemporary eyes, but clearly not contemporary. In particular, waistcoats/vests are back in a big way, men's jackets tend to be made of patterned fabric and often lack lapels, and women wear opaque tights that match their skirts. However, it's worth pointing out that Star Trek really only developed a decent non-uniform clothing style after several years of the TNG/DS9 era had passed. Up until then civilian clothing tended to consist of all-too-obvious jumpsuits (Jake Sisko in the first season of Deep Space Nine is a particularly bad example, as he's supposed to be a 14-year-old but goes around wearing what look like giant baby-gros).
    • Deep Space Nine often continues the "done right" trend, though it's hard to tell whether Voyager meant to play this straight or not - Neelix is usually the worst-dressed being imaginable, with complicated cuts and folds of an eye-hurting blend of colours, but that also feeds his Alternate Character Interpretation as an irritating sociopath. Guest aliens include people who appear to wear strings of LEDs and wrap themselves in shower curtains.
      • The Ferengi civilian clothes are done quite notably well. Civilian Ferengi males typically wear clothing that is styled similarly to the uniforms of starship crew, but also different and more expensive-looking, in much the same manner that contemporary business attire resembles (usually older) military uniforms. (Until Quark and company came along, we didn't see any Ferengi that weren't crew on a ship.)
      • Their females are never seen, but this doesn't limit the ability to critique their clothes... as until the very end of DS9 they didn't wear any.
    • While "Done Right" seems to apply generally to races we're meant to like, "bad guy" races tend to fall pretty hard into the Space Clothes trap. The Romulan Star Empire and its epic love affair with insanely large shoulder pads leads the charge, followed up by the Cardassian military and their horrendously uncomfortable-looking work uniforms, apparently made from hard plastic.
    • On the rare occasions when Federation civilians were seen the original series, they tended to wear either the aforementioned jumpsuits (the standard outfit for non-Starfleet adult men, even when it makes no sense) or 1960s mod fashions (more-or-less reserved for women and children). In fact, the eventual look of Federation civilian clothes seems to have evolved from the mod fashions used in the original series. You can see the transition throughout Star Trek: The Next Generation (mostly with children's costumes, since the adults tended wear uniforms, jumpsuits, or character-specific outfits).
  • In Stargate Atlantis, the civilian personnel wear completely plausible uniforms (aside from fitting a bit too well), but you can see the Space Clothes inspiration. The military personnel, being normal modern Earth soldiers, wear normal modern Earth military gear. Some of the alien societies, on the other hand, go much further.
    • The Wraith have the coolest clothing. While normal drones wear what looks like chitin and queens have gowns, officers are clad in black leather from neck to feet. Considering they are really pale and have white hair, this makes for a nice contrast. Travelers have a black & red version while Ancients and Asurans usually wear a futuristic white and cream-colored suit. Regarding the Vanir, they always tank around in copper-colored powered armor except in one case when they revealed their true nature: as Asgards, they are completely naked. And needless to say, Tau'ri wear BDUs. Genii clothing looks like WW 2-era Soviet uniforms.
  • While Firefly is intentionally devoid of this for the most part due to its Space Western feel, with most of the characters dressing as according to the frontier concept or in ways related to American or Chinese culture in general, Jubal Early, the Operative and several other characters wear straight-up Space Clothes. In the two named characters' cases, this is said to be body armour rather than regular clothing, though... but damn do they just look like jumpsuits.
    • Jubal Early's jumpsuit thingy is a spacesuit, or doubles as one. He used it to float between his ship and Serenity.
    • One does have to wonder, however, about how Pesephone's return to Regency fashions came about...
  • Star Trek: The Original Series justified its famous miniskirts as being a symbol of Sixties liberation, but it's worth noting that spacewomen in 1950s TV sci-fi also had short skirts (e.g. Carol Carlisle in Space Patrol, and Vena Ray in Rocky Jones: Space Ranger).
  • The 2007 Flash Gordon series averts this, for the most part. Ming the Benevolent Father almost always wears a military uniform and is only once seen in a ceremonial robe. Baylin, being a Bounty Hunter, wears rugged clothing reminiscent of Han Solo. If anything, most clothing seems old, which makes sense given that Mongo is a Crapsack World after their environment was poisoned and the old civilization destroyed. This was probably deliberate to make the show less campy than the original.
  • An episode of SCTV involving a spaceflight to upgrade a TV satellite (It Makes Sense in Context) had the mission crew wearing jump suits with the shoulder seam rolls that show these are Space Clothes.
  • Space: 1999 was obviously an influence on Star Trek: The Motion Picture with its double knit uniforms in taupe. One standout design feature was the single colored sleeve that told the audience what department the character was in. Season Two added an orange parka that actually made them less Space Clothes-like.
  • In Red Dwarf, Rimmer and Lister initially wore their Red Dwarf uniform of jacket, shirt, trousers and boots (Rimmer kept his immaculate whilst Lister wore a Custom Uniform variation.) By the third season though Lister's clothing stayed pretty much the same, but Rimmer wore a bright green suit.
  • Classic Doctor Who was a repeat offender, but the new series has mostly avoided silvery spandex.

Music Videos


Professional Wrestling

  • In WCW in 1992 a tag team called The New Breed, who were billed as being from the year 2002 where Dusty Rhodes is president of the United States, made their debut. While their clothes weren't too out of place (aside from being very loud), their hairstyles (which you sadly don't get a good look at in this picture) were beyond absurd, looking not unlike a do-it-yourself cutjob. Supposedly this was how people did their hair in the future.


Tabletop Games

  • GURPS Traveller. The volume Interstellar Wars has the best art work of all the Gurps Traveller's(given that the others are all black and white, it's not a contest). It shows Terrans dressed in clothes that look reasonably similar to modern clothes(dark blue uniforms for Terran spacers for instance) and Vilani in exotic looking clothes(flowing robes and the like) that still look vaguely human. Both styles tend to be reasonably handsome.
  • Warhammer 40,000: the only spaceship crew that actually have models are the Tau Air Caste. They wear odd alien jumpsuits and vests in the traditional style of Tau armor.
    • Eldar and Space Marine pilots wear the same sort of armor as the ground troops, Imperial Guard pilots wear heavier armor and breath masks in the style of the Stormtroopers, and Chaos pilots are typically fused with their planes.
  • The illustrations in the Trinity rulebook tended to do Space Clothing Done Right, with unusual but generally not bizarre or impractical garments.


Video Games

  • Mass Effect 2 and its future-blouse.
    • Though humans and Asari have equal shares in the Stripperific department, there.
  • Halo avoids this for the most part, though the working uniforms worn by UNSC Navy crewmen seem to have been inspired a bit by Star Trek, particularly the color-coded versions worn by specialized personnel. Still, even those are fairly sensible in appearance.
  • Killzone features, among other things, PAGST helmets, 21st Century ballistic vests, and... orange sweaters.
  • Borderlands has Mordecai in what appears to be a cross between a Mexican luchador and male dominatrix outfit - with ski goggles.
    • his outfit is more of a gimp mask with a sleeveless cropped motorcycle top. Still odd, but mainly the mask—if you're a sniper, why wear something that restricts your vision so?
  • Freelancer plays with this. There are people who wear clothes that would be normal today, such as suits and and Trent's leather jacket. There are also those that wear clothes styles typically associated with Space Clothes. And then, there are Rheinland and Kusari clothes who mix old/traditional clothing with future fashions.
  • The few articles of clothing worn by Shadow the Hedgehog are in line with this style.
  • Space Channel 5 has everyone wearing crazy space outfits.


Web Comics

Web Original


Western Animation

  • Futurama! Occasionally unusual fashions are seen or mentioned—extras often wear censor bars, and military uniforms are like Star Trek without pants (and we do mean TOS miniskirts even on the guys)--but for the most part, everyone wears 20th/21st Century clothes... with peaked shoulder rings. Grimy denim jackets, janitor's cover-alls, even the wall-eyed old lady's old-lady-shirt.
    • One episode saw Fry and co. at a retro dance place:

Amy: Oh wow, it's totally retro!
Fry: Why is everyone wearing those rings?
Amy: Guh! Because nobody wears 'em anymore. Rings are stupid.
Fry: I think they look cool.
Amy: Shhh! Don't let anyone hear you say that!
Guy: Hey, did that lot say rings are cool?
Amy: Nope. He said they're stupid.
Guy: Cooool!


Real Life

  • The stuff worn by ravers can easily be mistaken for space clothes.
    • That's the point. The labels of some rave-clothing producers such as Cyberdog even have small notes saying it is "Suitable for Terrestrial wear".
  • Lady Gaga. Obviously.
  • MIT is testing the "pocketless spandex" type as a way to prevent bone decay when in space (Yes, that is Richard Garriott in the picture).
  • Some of the popular fashions of The Eighties could easily be mistaken for such by a time traveler from an earlier period. Maybe not the shoulder-padded power suits, but... the lycra... the jelly bracelets... everywhere... Getting too close to this trope may be why '90s fashion went in the complete opposite direction.
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