This season’s silver boiler suit
Back in 2012, the American novelist Kurt Andersen wrote a smart essay arguing that the more things were changing, the more they were staying the same. Plus ça change and all that. His point, though, was that while technology was driving radical, transformative shifts, it was all hidden behind the screen. Out in the real world, the pace of change was juddering to a halt. The cars, clothes, furniture, architecture and cultural output of 2012 didn’t look or sound that different from the way they looked and sounded in 1992. Regular Wallpaper* readers, alerted on a monthly basis to new design, architecture and fashion, may beg to differ but Andersen was on to something.
Where, for instance, are the aluminium foil boiler suits we were…
