Super-luxe Antiquity or Nero’s bathtub
Embedded Technology or ultrasonic knives
Archival Data or Cerabyte
Bread and Circuses or Trump’s White House UFC stage
Wearable Surveillance or Meta’s new smart glasses
The Mark of the Beast or Brit Card
What makes an object cyberpunk? The immediate images that come to mind are cyborg tech: brain-computer interfaces, eyeballs that see in light spectrums invisible to humans, Wolverine’s adamantium bones, Neo’s headjack, Elon Musk’s Neuralink, Meta’s new smart glasses. Cyberpunk is arriving. But the aesthetics of it feel rather mundane…
It’s missing the -punk part of the portmanteau.
Clothes that are worn and ragged to match tech that is worn and ragged too. Jerry-rigged out of flotsam from the past. Predictably, some mix of eighties. The same decade the genre’s canonical works were created: the film Blade Runner, released in 1982; Neuromancer by William Gibson, published in 1984; and Mirrorshades, a cyberpunk anthology, edited by Bruce Stirling in 1986.
It’s always 1980-something in the cyberpunk genre. 1980-something with cool gadgetry, bionic implants, and space opera tier technology, but 1980-something nonetheless. Thus, we get a rush of eighties nostalgia: avant-garde New Romantics make-up, chopped-and-screwed post-punk haircuts, goth leather and latex, sometimes with the faded veneer of power dressing: shoulder pads, metallics, stiletto heels.
Like this non-existent Carhartt jacket that looks straight out of 2017’s Blade Runner 2049 or the 2020’s Cyberpunk 2077. Note: don’t buy it. It’s a scam.
