All things design and fashion

Hi everyone, Im the newest  addition to the esquared fashion team, I work at Springleap HQ where I’m involved in bringing the world the freshest and coolest Tees on the planet. . Hope you enjoy my first installment on the fantastic world of Steampunk Fashion.

Steampunk is a very intriguing   fashion   subculture which has emerged almost in violent reaction to the modern world’s obsession with mass production and its consumerist society. In some ways it is a subculture still madly in love with the inventiveness and creativity of modern technology yet disillusioned with the flat plastic facades of the modern machine.

Having it roots and parallels in the dystopian worlds of Cyberpunk, the amazing fashion of Steampunk is rather a nostalgic and romantic view of a technological advanced world which has still maintained the values of craftsmanship, ingenuity and revolution.  It as if we could visit a parallel reality in which the great achievements of the Bauhaus and its grand modernist paradigm where laughed at and instead mankind developed the themes of the Victorian era to their logical end.

More and more we see the fascinating world of the Neo-Victorian and sophisticated punk emerging into popular culture. In many ways it reflects man’s eternal struggle to come to terms with technology, behind it the perennial   Asimovian concern that man’s creation will and in some ways has spiraled out of his control.

 Among the examples are theHayao Miyazki modern classics, Howl’s Moving Castle and Laputa: Castle in the Sky  as well as  the cult classic anime series, The Full Metal Alchemist. Earlier examples  of influential fiction include William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s  1990  novel The Difference Engine  and of course  a vast body of works from early science fiction authors such as H G wells and Jules Verne.

Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neil’s The League of Extraordinary Gentleman graphic novel and subsequent film adaptation has been a hallmark work in popularizing the Steampunk paradigm  and propelling it into mainstream culture.

Steampunk represents an evolutionary step in fashion’s continuous quest to express social and ideological  movements fusing subcultures such as goth, cyberpunk, industrial and Neo Victorian.