[Image: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].
Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, historian, and educator based in Berkeley, California. His work spans a huge range of topics and scales, as his new and utterly fascinating book,Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, makes clear.From the fashionable worlds of Christian Dior and Playtex to the military-industrial complex working overtime on efforts to create a protective suit for U.S. exploration of the moon, and from early computerized analyses of urban management to an "android" history of the French court, all by way of long chapters on the experimental high-flyers and military theorists who collaborated to push human beings further and further above the weather—and eventually off the planet itself—de Monchaux's book shows the often shocking juxtapositions that give such rich texture and detail to the invention of the spacesuit: pressurized clothing for human survival in space.
[Image: From Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo by Nicholas de Monchaux].
Bridging the line between clothing and architecture, the spacesuit is a portable environment: a continuation of habitable space, safe for human beings, capable of radical detachment from the Earth. That a "soft" and pliable suit designed by Playtex—manufacturer of women's underwear—would beat the "hard," armor-like suit design of military contractors is the surprising core story of de Monchaux's research.
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