Unitard!

In yesterday's book of the week, 2007's Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived, author Daniel H. Wilson discussed all sorts of things expected by the year 2000 or a little later, like the titular jetpacks, and cryogenic freezing, and holograms. Also included was a chapter on unisex jumpsuits. As Wilson wrote: "First you put on your underwear, then your pants -- modern life can be so difficult. In the future of the past, however, life was as simple as sliding into a snug, velvety unitard."

Well, I look around and I see lots of sweat pants and cargo shorts and T-shirts and ball caps, and precious few unitards. But my wife told me she heard that jumpsuits, which enjoyed a vogue in the eighties, are making a comeback! I immediately thought of all those cool eighties rockers, like Jem and the Holograms.

But are jumpsuits really making a comeback? Worse, will I have to get one?

One of the earliest popular one-piece articles of clothing -- not togas or loincloths, but things with sleeves and legs -- was the union suit, patented in 1868 as a means of freeing women from the restrictive misery of the underwear at the time. Men came to like them as well, and soon they were worn by all sorts of people.

And soon after that they were a sign of laughable hokum. Put a cartoon character in a union suit and he immediately looked like an ignoramus. Extra points if you show the butt flap.

Even inner-city characters like Ma Hunkel, alias the original Red Tornado, was given a union suit costume for comic purposes.

And yet they are still worn today, because of their warmth and utility. But that's underwear; what about one-piece outerwear?

The word jumpsuit dates to 1944, according to Merriam-Webster's, when for some reason large numbers of American men were being taught to jump out of airplanes. Of course you wanted (and still want) one-piece outerwear for that kind of behavior. You don't want the rushing air to whip off your shirt, and maybe take the harness of the parachute with it.

But the one-piece outfit was older than both these accouterments, according to those pests Merriam and Webster. The word coverall goes back to 1824, they say, and thus described the protective full-body clothes needed for dirty jobs in the Industrial Revolution. Now, of course, coveralls are seen on prisoners, some police and military officers, crack-avoiding plumbers, car mechanics, and others.

But the jumpsuit as a science fiction craze came from real pilots and astronauts. The safety precautions and technology available for these daredevils made the one-piece uniform equivalent to space exploration, and since future = space, the adult onesie became what we expected the people of the future to wear. Plus, most space travelers seen in movies and books, and later on TV, wore uniforms, as space travel was expected to be a military-type job, and they would wear jumpsuit-type things. Thus the expectations that in the future we would all dress in utilitarian one-piece unisex clothes. Call it a jumpsuit or coverall or even unitard -- on second thought, skip unitard. While the word leotard comes from the name of the famed French acrobat Jules Léotard (whom I have written about before), lopping off the last syllable and adding to the uni from uniform makes it sound like clothing for the mentally deficient, at least if you went to my public schools. Maybe it's the name for particularly stupid unicorns. Never mind.

Whatever you call it, the unisex jumpsuit never caught on. Why? Wilson writes, "Designers used aesthetic symbols and technological advancements to envision a beautiful future populated by slim, graceful humans wearing silvery, sexless jumpsuits. Do you think it will ever happen? Fat chance."

Yeah, we're not all slim, it's true, and few of us would look good in skintight anything. But I maintain that we're just not unitard people anyway. The unitard is a uniform, and an American wants a damn good reason to have to wear a uniform. That kind of thing is popular for people who like to think of the surging mass of humanity as ants, an army ready to tackle things as a single horde, dealing with everything as the moral equivalent of war. Revolt or fall behind and it's the gulag.

But if anything we're sliding off too far in the other direction, where communities, fraternal organizations, societies, families, everything involving human connection is fading, like we're all negatively charged and repel each other. Which situation has its own flaws, obviously, but at least it doesn't require that we wear identical unitards.

On the other hand, it gets pretty cold up in the north sometimes, and if we get a good enough spell, maybe we will all be wearing adult onesies ...

... but hopefully under our clothes, where others don't have to see them.