iRelle

Imagine a reality where technology stopped with the steam engine. Perhaps that’s not quite right. Imagine that instead of continuing on to the invention the internal combustion engine and all that followed, technology took a sharp right-angle turn and inventors instead made huge gains with steam and clockwork power, generating hundreds of inventions and turning every citizen –certainly not just the men folk – into a brass-laden, well-clad adventurer with gadgets for every occasion, straight out of Da Vinci’s notebooks. Plastic and vinyl are things never known, and every street scene looks a little like a classic fairground with hints of vintage rollercoaster carriages and merry-go-rounds filigree. People have harnessed the wind and taken to the sky – but with strapped-on wings made from wood and leather, or in dirigibles taken twenty steps beyond hot-air-balloon –Wilbur and Orville completely miss out, this time round. Welcome to the world of… SteamPunk!

SteamPunk is a fashion trend that I won’t pretend to know anything about, since I only learned that it existed about thirty minutes ago. Maybe it’s slanderous to call it a trend, or to suggest that it’s just fashion – I have a lot to learn. It doesn’t take much to capture my imagination, though, and I’ve been trawling through flickr ever since looking for examples of this fantastic costuming! Some folks make it a special-occasion thing, dressing up for cosplay games – others take their steampunk seriously, 24/7. I can only imagine what it would be like to walk through the gates of a renaissance fair, into a horde of SteamPunk and similarly-clad people… welcome to our alternate reality! Take a number and we’ll be with you as soon as we can…

It’s a theme that has been tackled (not directly) through computer games such as the Myst series, and more candidly through the works of sci-fi writers – One famous book which may have pioneered or at least inspired SteamPunk is The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. Jules Verne and Mark Twain also contributed to the SteamPunk-able canon.

Every click, I find myself further intrigued, fascinated, amazed and incredulous. The costumes are sufficiently 21^st-centuried up: tight in all the right places on the ladies, a hint of black leather or nerf gun there – but all wrapped up in a very discernable Victorian layer of respectability, with a dash of the new, the exciting – the conquering, colonising Britain at the height of the era when they set out to find new worlds and make new empires – although there’s always the suggestion that with SteamPunk, we’re talking about the final frontier.

SteamPunk is best explained through pictures, so to get a better idea head over to the Steampunk Fashion Pool on flickr, or check out the wikipedia article.

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