JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1766    [Part of the History of the Future series.]

• Thanks to 2NerdyHistoryGirls (here) who introduced me to Forgotten Futures (here) who reproduced the article of today’s attention. The article in the original format is located here.

At the end of the century the very popular British journal Strand Magazine published a marvel of a short story on the history of the future and the future of clothing and fashion.   (The Strand published Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and as a matter of fact would publish the for-a-short-while the last of them in December, the famous “The Final Problem” adventure, perhaps better know today in a variant form for Sherlock Holmes BBC viewers as “Reichenbach Falls”.)

The article–the “Future Dictates of Fashion”, and published in January 1893 by W. Cade Gall–was an interesting look into the past’s future.  The story is in which an elderly gentleman of 1893 finds a book published in 1993 about the history of modern fashions from 1893-1993, The Past Dictates of Fashion, by Cromwell Q. Snyder, “Vestamentorum Doctor”.  Dr. Snyder of the Future presents the logic of fashion, a fashion powered and governed by immutable laws, trends discernible by deduction and logic, except of course in the (future) present, where things have made a turn into the indefinable.

Its a amusing story, and the fashions are bizarre and have a weird alien/Buck Rogers/Dr. Seuss/Wizard of Quality, all of which goes for naught, as the story of the history book of the future is part of an old man’s dream, and the old man wakes up at the end of Gall’s own story.