Reading Italian Futurism through the lens of postwar politics has sometimes obscured its postmodern and posthumanist legacy. While the movement’s violent rhetoric of machine optimism has been seen to herald Right-wing despotism and patriarchy, it aspired to nothing less than a total aesthetic revolution that would remake mankind in the image of a mechanized world. Bodies, they theorized in numerous manifestos, were not fixed, but were evolving and expanding possibilities of self-design. This article explores how Futurist ideas about fashion and technology constitute a connective tissue between the historical and contemporary avant-gardes. Alexander McQueen’s designs are used to illustrate the ways that Futurist technolatry, or machine optimism, have evolved and endured.
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Jennifer S. Griffiths (2020) studied this question.
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