What is Future Fashion?

Metallic fabrics. Exaggerated silhouettes. Layers upon layers of fringe. And head-to-toe beadwork. For five contemporary Indigenous designers, this is what comes to mind when envisioning outfits for the future.

In September, these designers—Jamie Okuma, Orlando Dugi, Caroline Monnet, Jason Baerg, and Jontay Kahm—shared their work on the Getty Center’s travertine-terrace-turned-runway at a special fashion show for Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology, an exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West that is part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide. Against a backdrop of candy-colored lights and pulsing electronic beats, models took to the runway to flaunt looks that blend tradition with radical innovation.

From sparkling, puff-sleeved menswear by Dugi (Diné) to dentalium shell earrings and geometric print dresses inspired by parfleche rawhide carrying bags by Okuma (enrolled member of the La Jolla band of Indians, Luiseno, Shoshone-Bannock, Wailaki, and Okinawan), the designs merged high-fashion couture and Native art techniques. Monnet (Anishinaabe and French-Canadian) transformed discarded building materials, repurposing them into sustainable woven patchwork coats and sculptural outerwear, while models draped in flowing gowns created by Baerg (Cree-Métis) danced on the runway to show his fluid pieces in motion.

“The runway show is a revolutionary moment, carving out space for Indigenous designers—North America’s original haute couture creators,” says Amber-Dawn Bear Robe, curator and organizer of the fashion show. “This event redefines the future of fashion by fusing Indigenous knowledge with cutting-edge design, pushing the boundaries of American style. It’s a bold statement of Indigenous innovation, reclaiming and reshaping the fashion world for new generations.”

More Futurist Fits: Cyberpunks and Zero Waste Fashion

Rethinking fashion norms is a common thread throughout dozens of PST ART exhibitions now on view at museums and art spaces across Southern California. You can see how artists of the past and today have examined ways of living in both real and imagined environments. From bioengineered space suits to sci-fi costumes, we’ve rounded up some must-see works to help you explore creative self-expression, push the limits of functional fashion, and maybe even inspire your future wardrobe.

Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology
Autry Museum of the American West
Through June 21, 2026

Traditional materials, motifs, and regalia of Native peoples merge with the avant-garde in Future Imaginaries as a way of navigating colonial trauma and building alternative, sustainable futures that center Indigenous knowledge systems. Works include Indigenous takes on popular sci-fi characters from Star Wars; ethereal pieces like a reptilian, sculptural dress with pebble mask by Plains Cree designer Jontay Kahm (who presented his work at the Getty runway show); and one-of-a-kind accessories: hand-beaded Christian Louboutin boots, bison horns adorned with Swarovski crystals, and a gas mask embellished with quartz, leather, earth, and beads. Pueblo artist and potter Virgil Ortiz’s installation ReVOlt 1680/2180: Sirens & Sikas immerses visitors in an otherworldly landscape filled with intricate ceremonial outfits, spacecraft, and monumental ceramics to re-create the historic Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in a conceptual world 500 years in the future.

Views of Planet City
SCI-Arc Gallery and Pacific Design Center Gallery
Through February 14, 2025 (SCI-Arc Gallery) and January 26, 2025 (Pacific Design Center Gallery)

What would a socially and environmentally sustainable city for seven billion people look like, and what would its citizens wear? Speculative architect Liam Young and SCI-Arc faculty imagine a future where the entire human population occupies a single, hyperdense megalopolis, allowing the natural environment to thrive. As people mix, new cultures and ways of living emerge. Zero Waste Weavers, outfitted in intricately woven headpieces reminiscent of Chinese lion masks, create clothing from entirely recycled fabrics and reclaimed yarns with no offcuts or other wasted materials. Algae Divers, in fringed face coverings and robes in rosy hues, harvest pink algae blooms, a renewable food source. These figures are part of what Young envisions as a continual festival procession around the planet, where citizens intermingle and celebrate their dynamic and evolving cultures. Originally designed for his film Planet City, the outfits were developed in collaboration with Ane Crabtree, costume designer for The Handmaid’s Tale and Westworld. A series of festival masks are on view in the exhibition alongside large-scale movie miniature models. Participatory building workshops and video game simulation modeling offer a refreshingly optimistic vision of our collective future.

Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema
Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Through April 12, 2026

Sci-fi fans, rejoice! This exhibition celebrates all things cyberpunk, showcasing costumes, props, concept art, and more from iconic films that epitomize the genre’s love of high-tech gadgets and dystopian grit. A highlight is an original Blue Warrior suit from cult classic Tron (one of the earliest films to feature computer-generated imagery extensively), complete with helmet, armor, and glowing neon circuitry patterns. Fans of cyberpunk-inspired costume design will have lots to explore across materials from films like Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Neptune Frost, which is renowned for its Afrofuturist outfits repurposing e-waste (think headdresses wrapped in electrical wire and keyboard-clad jackets).

Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice
Hammer Museum
Through January 5, 2025

Indigenous space travelers dressed in protective “sovereignty suits” are at the center of multidisciplinary artist Cannupa Hanska Luger’s site-specific installation Sovereign. Playing with 1950s Hollywood sci-fi, the suits blend woven, ceramic, and hand-blown glass elements with repurposed surplus materials from the arts industry. The armor shields wearers from hostile environments (both beyond the planet and inside a museum) as they navigate the space-time continuum with Red Rover, a four-legged robotic droid. “The works are embedded in a holistic theme of future ancestral technology, an exploration into time, space, and how you can navigate through both of those things,” says Luger, whose work is on view at both the Hammer Museum and the Autry Museum of the American West as part of PST ART. “Institutions, museums, our memory, and our history are like time capsules. As artists, scientists, and people presently developing culture, we are making those time machines that we dream of. They’re navigating through a fourth-dimensional space that we can’t quite yet comprehend.”

Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation
One Archives at the USC Libraries presented at the USC Fisher Museum of Art
Through Nov 23, 2024

Some of the earliest cosplays in recorded history and demonic drag performances are just a couple of highlights of this exhibition spotlighting early queer history in LA through the lens of science-fiction fandom and the occult. Focusing on artists, scientists, and visionary thinkers from the 1930s through the 1960s, the exhibition explores underground circles that celebrated self-expression through films, photography, painting, collage, music, and costumes, including two reproductions of one of the first instances of cosplay outfits. Originally worn at the first World Science Fiction Convention in New York City in 1939 by Forrest J. Ackerman, a science fiction literary agent and member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, and fanzine editor Myrtle R. Douglas (known by fans as Morojo), the “futuricostumes” are based on sci-fi films and imagined realities.

Emergence
Fathomers, presented at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center
Through December 15, 2024

Pat Pataranutaporn’s CyberBiome, on view in Emergence, is a proposed bioengineered space suit that literally embodies what the artist describes as “the future of human-computer interaction.” A wearable, programmable bio-digital organ sits on the back of an astronaut, monitoring and responding to their day-to-day health needs in space through a network of engineered living cells, 3D-printed bioreactors, and a light-activated genetic circuit. A technologist and researcher at MIT, Pataranutaporn has worked with NASA, Stanford, and Harvard and explored human-AI interaction and synthetic biology across projects ranging from other bio-digital wearable “labs” designed for space exploration and mind-controlled 3D printers.

Invisibility: Powers & Perils
OXY ARTS
Through February 22, 2025

Spend time with the unseeable in this OXY ARTS exhibition, which explores the aesthetic politics of invisibility through the work of artists, scientists, and activists. For Cosmic Bitcasting, artist Afroditi Psarra and experimental physicist Cécile Lapoire collaborated on a dress that doubles as a detection device for the unseen cosmic radiation that surrounds us. The garment detects gamma radiation, x-rays, and alpha and beta particles that pass through our bodies, setting off a series of embedded actuators that light up and vibrate when this sensory information is processed. Inspired by the idea of connecting the human body with the cosmos, the dress is envisioned as an open-source garment, meaning anyone can make one, create other wearable detector clothing, and engage in an experimental approach to do-it-yourself and collaborative practices of particle physics.