Editor’s Observe: This story was first printed on March 16, 2016, a couple of week after there was a complete photo voltaic eclipse in Indonesia. In anticipation of the approaching photo voltaic eclipse, the primary in the US since 2017, this piece has been edited and expanded.
At his Fall 1999 present, Stephen Sprouse debuted prints he created utilizing NASA photographs taken on Mars by Pathfinder in entrance of an viewers carrying 3-D glasses. Whereas some critics understood Sprouse’s futurism within the context of Y2K, his use of those prints wasn’t a mere stylistic gesture. As Patricia Morrisroe wrote the designer’s m.o. was to wed “downtown cool with uptown luxurious and space-age materials.” It wasn’t the designer’s first collaboration with NASA, both. In 1984, the always-forward-thinking (and variably solvent) designer offered an unforgettable, to-capacity present on the Ritz nightclub. There, whereas a video confirmed spacecraft in takeoff mode, Sprouse’s muse, the transgender mannequin Teri Toye, joined catwalkers carrying “interplanetary prints” primarily based on NASA imagery, which the designer enlarged and printed over with backward graffiti that spelled out the identify of the planet. “Stephen beloved music and outer area,” defined Sprouse’s co-biographer Mauricio Padilha. “In going by means of his archives, I got here throughout a handwritten quote that learn: ‘Too far shouldn’t be far sufficient.’ I feel if Stephen had been alive he would have been the primary to contact Elon Musk to get a ticket to outer area!”
Stephen Sprouse, fall 1984
