Steampunk | Ouno Design

From left, Deacon Boondini, the Great Gatsby and Giovanni James of the James Gang, a neovaudevillean performance troupe in NYC in full steampunk gear.

I’m not the first to blog about this, but I couldn’t not jump into the fray. Because look at it! It’s the most fantastical thing to have happened in years.

Steampunk, “the long-lived trend of combining the best of Victorian England with technological advances that didn’t actually take place until a hundred years later,” has its roots in literature: William Gibson, Neil Stephenson and Paul Di Fillipo’s The Steampunk Trilogy (not to mention The Golden Compass). With their own roots in writers like Jules Verne, the novels imagine alternate sci-fi worlds of a past-infused future full of technologies such as diving bells, ornithopters and dirigibles. From its origin in novels, steampunk has blossomed into a multimedia and fashion storm identified by a wide mix of antique and also sci-fi accoutrements: neo-Victorian, neo-Edwardian and 19th C military gear, contemporary preppy labels, monocles, old cogs, and burlap-covered TVs. It’s a post-apocalyptic but gentlemanly version of Mad Max and a million other cultural references, and consequently is a little hard to pin down, which perhaps explains its successes (Google it: “Results 1 – 10 of about 3,120,000 for steampunk“) because there’s something in it for almost everyone. Despite its nostalgia/romanticism, somehow it’s more appealing than the Depression-era newsboy-cap chic the hipsters are wearing. Both are pretty earnest, but at least the former has madness going for it.

Source: NYT and brassgoggles.

The James Gang is opening a Steampunk shop in Nolita, and will be selling “brass Rubik’s cubes, riding boots, early-20th-century-style motorbikes, handmade leather mailbags and brass or wooden iPhone cases.”

Steampunk Ornithopter, by Professor Maelstromme: