You’re living in Syd Mead’s future, whether you realize it or not. In 1978, the illustrator imagined a Kentucky Derby complete with smart-phone-like devices and a floating platform clairvoyantly inscribed with the word “INRNET.” In 1982, his flying cars and noir cityscapes appeared in one of the most aesthetically influential films of all time,
Blade Runner. In 2016, the 82-year-old visual futurist still looks ahead: “The past has been done,” he told us the other day.
Opening Ceremony’s
Fall/Winter 2016 show embraced this forward-looking attitude, while paying homage to Mead’s many ideas that deserve fresh consideration. In Mead’s
Kentucky Derby, spacecraft hover above a racetrack. In our set, cars from the future rendered from helium balloons were surrounded by a racetrack-like runway, while three
2016 Lexus RXs were coated in Liquid City, a signature print from the collection.
During an exciting collaboration, OC co-founder Humberto Leon and Syd Mead got together to discuss future fashion, anchoring fantasy in lived experience, and whether robots will take over the world.
HUMBERTO LEON: What does it mean to you to be a “visual futurist”?
SYD MEAD: I’ve been doing design work, renderings, and illustrations my whole life. They’re mostly about the future because if it’s already happened, it’s in a book somewhere. Or now, it’s on Google. The past is part of our reference library, but it’s not what I do.
Your illustrations from the 1970s and 1980s imagined what the world would look like in 2016. Do these works still depict the future? Or did we end up living in a different future?
The difficulty with science fiction is that we’ve caught up with the future. You can’t have a movie where the stars are walking around with something you could buy at Sharper Image. Things have to be just pure magic. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” By imagining things that are still considered impossible technologically, it keeps a film in its own future. Remember the
Star Trek movie, where they had transparent steel? Molecularly, that’s not possible!
Or Wonder Woman’s plane.
Yes, you’re right! Wonder Woman’s plane.
You worked as an illustrator for Ford Motor Company and other corporations for many years. How did you get into film production design?
I did a series of books for United States Steel, way back in the 1960s. [Special effects artist] John Dykstra had used one of my books as an imagination reference in college. So when the first
Star Trek movie came along, John called me up and said, “Would you like to work for a science-fiction film?” That was my first movie job in post-production, designing the V’ger Entity. Can you imagine that? The first movie I worked on from pre- to post-production was
Blade Runner.
And what was Blade Runner like?
Ridley [Scott] is an artist. He went to the Royal College of Art. So he would draw sketches to give me an idea of a visual for a scene. Then I would use my rendering ability and come up with a sort of garish, deteriorated city environment, and put in the vehicles I was hired to design. They looked like they were already in a finished movie, and [Ridley] liked that a lot. I sort of rendered myself into much more work on
Blade Runner than I was originally hired to do. After that came
2010,
Tron,