Smirnoff - Dictating fashion.

The sixties were an exciting time (I'm told). Some kind of cultural revolution or whatever. Bacteria-sharing sexual liberation called "swinging". Nutty clothes. I'd enjoy a stiff drink too. (Sidebar: One huge plus to living in 1968... the coolest race cars in history).

So who can blame Smirnoff for riding the wave of kookiness by landing a deal with Austrian fashion commandant Rudi Gernreich? Who-ey Gern-who?Yeah, I know. I had to look him up, too. He was born in Austria and fled to the U.S. in 1938 because of Those Darn Nazis. Gernreich was initally a dancer, getting into fashion through fabric design. It sounds like life under the Third Reich would have been kind of rough for him. So, 10 out of 10 for good thinking goes to Gernreich.

In space, no one can hear you fabulous.

Gernreich does deserve some credit for designing the costumes for Space 1999, my favorite vision of the squeaky clean vaccu-formed future that will never exist (along with the first 30 minutes of Star Wars).

Finally allowing his freak flag it's brithright of free flight, he designed whan I'm going to call "art clothes". These are clothes that aren't meant to be worn or functional in any way, but rather are intended to be worn for sixty seconds at a fashion show and then laughed at forty years later. Such clothes are popular among wankers fashion designers and people who worship fashion designers, and nobody else.

Well, almost nobody else. Can it be a coincidence that Gernreich, professional fashion fop, not only designed the kind of highly recyclable aluminized fashions that World's Ugliest Woman and total Dick-Tater Muammar Gaddafi prefers, but also slightly kind of really looks like him a lot in this ad?

Why does the harmless twin always die first?

Yep. Coincidence. They were alive at the same time. Gernreich died in 1985. So no, they're not the same person, but Gaddafi got all his hand-me-downs. Either they were brothers or Gaddafi was first in line at the Gernreich estate sale.

Art clothes make up the subject matter of  75% of the programming on Bravo, the alternative lifestyle network. The popularity of such shows as Maximum Fashion Slap-Fight and Argumentative Panzy Battle stand in stark contrast to the negligible relevance of clothes that look like lamp shades. There are still loads of people trying to out-ridiculous each other's fashions, but they're important only to each other.

As futuristic as Gernreich was trying to be, here we are in the future and nobody wears metallic fedoras. Jeans are still the pants of favor, and the one creature that does wear purple curtains is currently worth about a quarter in the global death pool.