Spacesuit – Fashioning Apollo

The story of the Apollo spacesuit, the 21-layer garment that landed on the moon, told by Nicholas de Monchaux in 21 essays relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. He touches, among other things, on eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior’s New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA’s Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning.

As observed by Tim Maly of Icon magazine: “De Monchaux swings masterfully between subjects, teasing out unexpected connections and spotting the seeds of contemporary life that were planted by the space race.”