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" IN THIS MONTH&amp;#039;S ISSUE, you&amp;#039;ll find our spring fashion forecast, and we think you&amp;#039;ll be pleased with the advances in textile technology that have been incorporated into the 2000-model clothes. Dow Corning has fixed that glitch in its solar-powered Corning Wear line and promises that enabling the cooling function on its Summersuit will no longer freeze the wearer solid, as often happened with the 1999&amp;#039;s. Texas Instruments is introducing a new Compushoe that is guaranteed not to crash, even while trudging through the polar-ice-cap slush of Manhattan or the swirling desert sands of the Mojave. The look this season is, of course, unitard, unless you&amp;#039;re an elder, and the colors once again are silver, royal-blue, or brown, depending on your designation.  This is the future, after all.  Although, alack, not that one. The future we find ourselves in is considerably less futuristic than the one we envisioned for ourselves not that long ago. Unitards have not caught on outside of the sci-fi conventions. We are not yet able to &amp;quot;press a button to formulate our clothing,&amp;quot; as one designer predicted in 1981. (&amp;quot;Do we want it to be opaque, should it give off steam, do we want it to light up, do we want it to glow in the dark?&amp;quot; he enthused, even as disco was breathing its last.) And despite Science Digest&amp;#039;s 1967 prognostication, &amp;quot;discarded rayon underwear&amp;quot; is not being &amp;quot;bought by chemical factories and converted into candy.&amp;quot; As far as forecasting fashion goes, we aren&amp;#039;t much more accurate from a short distance. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m thinking a lot about the year 2000,&amp;quot; David Wolfe, who was something called a &amp;quot;lifestyle forecaster,&amp;quot; told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1990. &amp;quot;I think fashion as we know it now is going to be absolutely dead because I think the fashion system is going to be dead, because it&amp;#039;s built on female inferiority complexes.&amp;quot; The future we were promised seems to have eluded us in so many ways. In a 1966 issue of Vogue, Arthur C. Clarke foretold of ying houses that would allow &amp;quot;whole communities [to] migrate south in the winter.&amp;quot; A 1950 Popular Mechanics predicted that by century&amp;#039;s end, all furniture would be made of plastic and rooms would have drains in the floor, so you could clean the house by simply turning on the hose. Even better, The New York Times prereported in 1966, &amp;quot;by the year 2000, housewives . . . will probably have a robot maid.&amp;quot; Also, &amp;quot;machines would be producing so much,&amp;quot; Time assured us that same year, &amp;quot;that everyone in the U. S. will, in effect, be independently wealthy.&amp;quot; We didn&amp;#039;t even get the satisfaction of the End of the World as We Know It, which seemingly everyone was predicting up until the final days of the Y1K&amp;#039;s. &amp;quot;I feel cheated, betrayed, misused, abused, deceived and everything else!&amp;quot; one disgruntled apocalyptico posted on 01/01/00, perhaps as it dawned on him that there would be no pretty ladies banging on his bunker door, offering to do just about anything for a cup of potable water. And so this is the way the world doesn&amp;#039;t end, not with a bang but a whiner. Here we are, actually living in the year that for so many years stood at the end of time, beckoning us with the promise of the impossible, and the elastic has gone out on our underpants. Underpants, mind you, not composed of some fantastic nougatlike polymer but of simple cotton--a crop, for god&amp;#039;s sake. Our house isn&amp;#039;t going anywhere. While we certainly own more machines than we once did, we are working more than ever.  And that&amp;#039;s just fine. The one thing futurists often forget about the future is that we&amp;#039;re going to be in it, most likely, and we have a stubborn fondness for doing things in old ways. We use our machines to work more because we enjoy producing, not just the end product. We could buy plastic furniture if we wanted, but, seriously. There&amp;#039;s something about a stationary house that makes it seem like home. And the fashion for well-dressed men may be suits for the hundredth year in a row, but we look good in a suit. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a1611/esq0300-mar-esky/>