As our environment grows more hostile, it may become more difficult to get dressed in the morning. Luckily, San Francisco's interactive science museum, the Exploratorium, has put together Second Skins: The Latest and Greatest in Protective Clothing - a fashion show for the survivalist in you. The unlikely runway performance - which opened Saturday and runs through 3 May - focuses on garments that allow our fragile organism to survive in such unfriendly environments as outer space, burning buildings, Arctic seas, and toxic waste sites.
"We are really weenies when it comes to what we can exist in," says Pam Winfrey, director of performing programs at the Exploratorium and curator of Second Skins. "If you go too hot or too cold, boy, we're dead."
Featuring about 20 ensembles, Second Skins covers a broad range of protective gear in three hazardous-condition categories: temperature protection wear; projectile wear (what to don when fending off incoming objects such as bullets and bees); and air, gas, and chemical wear.
One of the outfits flaunted down the catwalk includes a "turn out coat," borrowed from the Berkeley, California, fire department. A relic worn during an actual fire, the coat "has holes in it from where the guy was hit with molten aluminum," Winfrey says. Only the top layer of this coat burned, however, and the firefighter was ultimately protected by its multiple layers of flame-retardent, moisture-proof cloth. Another temperature-resistant garment, a bright orange suit designed for cold-water survival, is made of thick, head-to-toe rubber and protects against hypothermia.
But not all of the clothing on display is made to protect us against the environment; in some circumstances, the environment needs protection against us. The "bunny suits" worn by the technicians who built the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, serve to completely conceal the human body in an effort to keep our dirty, flaky skin from contaminating the atmosphere around sensitive machinery.
The most unsettling outfits on parade are the various uniforms of hazardous waste operators. Three such get-ups, on loan from the Environmental Protection Agency, demonstrate the lengths we must take to guard ourselves against airborne, chemical poisons. Both the "level B suit" and the "total encapsulating suit," for instance, require self-contained breathing apparatus. Before strutting these dystopian costumes down the runway, the models were given detailed training on the use of air tanks and respirator equipment.
Just how long will it be before such utilitarian safety garb is incorporated into the haute couture collections of Parisian designers and the pages of Vogue? "I don't know," Winfrey says. "But I imagine it will [happen]. I think there will be a necessity for it, horribly enough."
