Celebrating its 50th birthday this year, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is the landmark by which all sci-fi cinema is now compared. Still the subject of awe and intrigue, it’s the pinnacle of the ‘don’t complain, don’t explain’ attitude – Kubrick famously never discussed the ending, or what his intentions were. An interview he gave to Playboy at the time of release can be paraphrased succinctly: make of it what you will.
Jun Takahashi's AW18 Undercover collection
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Arthur C Clarke, whose short story The Sentinel was the blueprint for the script, explained, ‘If you understand 2001 completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered.’ The plot? A mysterious monolith has been found buried under the surface of the moon, and a mission is undertaken to make sense of it – with a ‘foolproof and incapable of error’ computer, HAL 9000, for company.
Released in 1968, the year of the Paris student riots and The Beatles’ White Album, Kubrick would use 2001 to play with elements of the avant-garde, spiking the mainstream. Over half its nearly three-hour running time is dialogue-free, while spacewalk sequences are totally silent: there is no sound in space. Historical themes also run throughout, from Renaissance interiors microdosed into the future via illuminated floors, to a soundtrack pairing Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube with compositions by György Ligeti. Simply put, Kubrick was masterful at grouping elements together in a way that had never been considered before. Even as 2001 races towards its pension, it remains relevant: it’s essentially a history of humanity so far, from primitive to spaceman. Even in 2018, that’s still about as far as we’ve got.
Jun Takahashi's AW18 Undercover collection
Indigital
Savile Row stalwart, dressmaker to the Queen and World War II spymaster Hardy Amies created 2001: A Space Odyssey’s costumes, and the film holds plenty of fashion clout today. This is a movie that Raf Simons keeps talking about in interviews; an always-and-forever pin-up on the moodboard of his mind. Thom Browne remarked that his SS11 Paris show venue, Oscar Niemeyer’s French Communist Party Headquarters, felt so much like something from 2001 that he added a passage of astronauts to the collection. Most recently, for AW18, Jun Takahashi presented his ‘Undercover’ collection at Pitti Uomo, plastering the image of HAL 9000 on a waistpack and prints of error messages, the Discovery 1 spaceship and astronaut David Bowman on clothes.
As for the advances in technology, the movie predicted video calling, tablet computers, voice recognition and artificial intelligence: everything we’re familiar with today, Alexa.
Read more:
The strangest images from the Making of 2001: A Space Odyssey
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/2001-a-space-odyssey-influenced-fashion-and-technology
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