Semionaut, Signifying Everything

For the love of lycra

Superheroes, cyclists and Trekkies all have one thing in common. Spandex. An inconspicuous anagram of ‘expands’ (though rightly so, since the fibre can reportedly stretch – prepare yourself – up to six hundred percent!!), spandex was invented by a man called Joe Shriver at DuPont in 1959. In the UK, it is almost generically referred to as Lycra. But the assumption superheroes wear spandex isn’t quite right. And that’s not because Batman, these days, wears Kevlar.

The earliest superhero comics (such as Superman in 1938) actually pre-date the invention of spandex by two decades. Dupont did, however, have a nice line in nylon stockings round about that time. Captain America’s patriotic array (1941) perhaps owes more to the tradition of hosiery than even he’s been told. Along with super-heroes and heroines, glam metal bands (Queen, Van Halen, Bon Jovi) and travelling contortionists have all helped stretch and sling spandex and its (usually aggressively trademarked) sibling incarnations off the historical trajectory and out towards the wastepaper basket of clothing history.

Except they haven’t. Not nearly. The re-birth of the contemporary Flandrien (or so s/he’d like to think) and its brutal alter-ego the ‘lycra lout’ has anorak-flashed spandex into the eyeballs of an unsuspecting British public once again. What maddens so many people – cyclists and non-cyclists alike – about this trend is the ludicrous aroma of accomplishment that somehow wafts from inside a vacuum-packed bicycle tight out on public parade. Men in Lycra will limb around art galleries and buy sandwiches ‘to stay’ and fetch kittens from trees and they’ll do it all wearing groinal cling-film that manages off-puttingly to show precisely nothing and absolutely everything at exactly the same time. It’s hard to launch a complaint against that kind of contradiction.

But the world of spandex is a wonderful and diverse place. Spandex also lies at the apex of contemporary culture’s anxious compounding of sex and idiocy (Diesel and American Apparel ad campaigns are a case in point), and the normalisation of the fetish that underlies the strange success of Zentai (full-body, skin tight garments that will help you look like Morph from Take Hart without the eyes). There’s a video out there that shows a pitch-invader in an all-green Lycra bodysuit outrunning six lunging security guards and escaping through a small panel at the side of the park held open for him by – wait for it – a compatriot dressed in an all-yellow Lycra bodysuit! I don’t advise you look it up, but I expect you will anyway.

The most interesting examples of contemporary spandexification, though, are those where the material breaks free of its functional imperative and holds its easy-on-easy-off knickers up to the wind. Spandex (or something like it) overlaps with art and architecture in Ernesto Neto’s colourful, tensile installations and Agata Olek’s crocheted fibre-art. Jean Nouvelle’s Serpentine Pavilion (2010) ended up as a sort of three dimensional awning, and solar canopies have an important role to play in the future of squeaky green dwelling. There’s Richard Serra’s wafer-thin boundary installations, too.

So we’re in for a stretchy future, and I for one am bloody excited. Not that I want city folk on their way to the office to carry on dressing like Alberic Schotte. I think they’ve met their match in the Zentai warriors anyway. The Zentai don’t take themselves too seriously, always seem to have anonymous pals around the corner, and are surprisingly sneaky considering how conspicuous they really ought to be. Practically the opposite, then, of Mr Specialized Allez. I’d call for a public ruckus, but a skirmish with so little friction would be too unsettling to properly enjoy.

© Gareth Lewis 2011