Everyday is Casual Friday
What Martian fashion tells us about identity, survival, and the future of being human
2 May 2025
You set your coffee down on the dresser as the habitat lights shift into morning mode—soft amber spilling across the walls, then cooling slowly into the pale white of simulated daylight. Not the daylight outside but rather the more intense version found on Earth. Another day on the Red Planet.
Steam curls from your mug in the stillness. Outside, somewhere beyond layers of shielding, Mars spins on—cold, red, and silent. But in here, the ritual continues.
You open the drawer. Getting dressed on Mars is, in many ways, refreshingly simple. The choices are few, and that’s a kind of comfort.
You reach for your base layers—soft, quick-drying, engineered for long wear in close quarters. Over that, your go-to set: dark gray pants and a lightweight, wool-like top. Breathable. Insulating. Cut for mobility but woven tightly enough to block a bit of ambient radiation with the carbon infused fabric. They're not flashy, but they feel like home.
The real decision comes next.
You open the smaller drawer. Colorful glasses. A few wristbands for your smartwatch. Shoes with heel flashes in coral, saffron, or cobalt blue. The clothes are uniform, but here—here, in the margins—you still get to be yourself.
You settle on a pair of violet frames and navy shoes with a reflective strip across the arch. It’s just enough.
As you turn toward the mirror, something bright catches your eye. There, draped carefully across the back of your chair, is the outfit you’ve been assembling for weeks—your look for the celebration next weekend. It’s bold, colorful, maybe even a little ridiculous. Layers of recycled fabric in colors that have no business being on Mars. You’ve been saving it, stitching and fussing with it whenever you had a spare moment.
You smile. Just the thought of wearing it makes your chest feel lighter. Because survival is necessary. But self-expression—that’s the first thing that makes it feel like you're truly alive.
On Mars, your clothing isn’t just a layer. It’s also something else. Something closer. It’s the first thing you put on in the morning. It rests on your skin. It shapes how you move, how you present yourself to others, how you remember that you are not just surviving—you are still human.
Clothing as Culture, Not Costume
The man I am speaking to on the Zoom call has the air of a professor you instantly trust, the kind who can take you from textiles to philosophy in a single sentence without you ever noticing the transition. Warm, present, quietly brilliant. He is wearing a black sweater with a crisp white shirt underneath, the collar neatly exposed so it frames his neckline with this clean, almost architectural line. The contrast is striking in a quiet way. The sweater looks soft, well-fitted, something chosen for comfort but still purposeful. His glasses add a touch of intellectual sharpness, dark frames that stand out just enough to anchor his face without overwhelming it. On his wrist, there’s a dark watch band, simple and functional. Dr. Karl Aspelund, Associate Professor of Textiles, Fashion Merchandising, and Design at the University of Rhode Island, is quick to note the distinction in the topic we are here to discuss today.
“If we take the word fashion to include the sort of day-to-day practices around clothing, rather than just what we would perceive as what we would call designer fashion or high fashion…this is a huge part of human culture.”
When I asked Karl why clothing matters on Mars, he did not hesitate to widen the frame. Fashion, in his mind, includes every day-to-day practice of clothing, not just the glossy realm of runways or designer labels.
He talked about the quiet but powerful codes of clothing in schools, offices, workplaces. How fashion shapes culture whether we acknowledge it or not. And how attempts at uniformity always produce rebellion.
Anyone who has ever worn a school uniform knows this instinct intimately. You shorten a hem. You roll a sleeve. You tweak something until the garment becomes yours again.
On Mars, these impulses do not vanish. They intensify. A colony of twenty, or fifty, or one hundred people living together for years will not tolerate sameness easily. Clothing becomes a pressure valve. A way to shift mood, signal identity, or make an otherwise standardized life feel textured.
Karl has studied communities living under restrictive conditions. Submarines. Antarctic research stations. Skylab.
And in every case, culture found a way in through clothing.
“The first thing that happens when you try to put people into a uniform culture is that people start modifying.”
The Long Haul
One of the most overlooked truths about Martian settlement is that most of it won’t feel like an adventure. It will feel like waiting.
Waiting for crops to grow. For oxygen to stabilize. For water to be recycled. For messages from home.
And in that waiting, our sense of time—and with it, our sense of self—will begin to shift. What we wear will be a key tool in managing that drift.
“So for a Mars crew, what you really would want to do is you would want to kit them out with clothing that lasts them for a lifetime.,” Aspelund explains. “And if it doesn't, then it's repairable or reusable.”
Fast fashion is incompatible with Martian life. On Earth, fashion moves faster than the seasons that once inspired it—shifting with algorithms, marketing cycles, and moods, feeding a culture built on novelty rather than need. The result is a system where clothing is rarely made to last, and even more rarely meant to endure—beautiful for a moment, disposable by design. “We've been cultured into a mindset of precisely not viewing it as a virtue to wear old clothing, to repair clothing,” Aspelund says. “Our virtue is flash, new."
This will not be a luxury mindset that future Martians can have. Clothing will need to be durable, modular, perhaps even biodegradable. A shirt might be worn hundreds of times, then broken down and re-spun into something new. Even then, Aspelund argues that we need to take this a step further to avoid clothing breaking down at all.
“The whole point of a good circular economy is to keep things from going into the recycle loop,” he says. “If it's viewed as a virtue to maintain and re-use and repair in the way that it used to, this would change..”
In a bygone era, it was a privilege to have your grandfather’s coat or your great grandmother’s dress passed down to you. Clothing becomes heirloom. Clothing becomes narrative. In a small colony, the garments passed down will be the first artifacts of Martian history. Martian fashion will need to be enduring fashion—because if it isn’t broken, you don’t need to fix it.
“Changing your clothes is one of the last real acts of autonomy we have. It’s a signal—to yourself and others—that something is happening. That time is passing. That you are awake and alive and doing something today.”
The Martian Aesthetic
When I asked Karl what Martians will actually look like, he grinned.
“I will often tell people only half seriously, but half seriously though,” he said, “that we're also going to be looking at a baseline style that is sort of emo.”
Why emo? Carbon infused polyester. Radiation shielding. Grayscale fabric. Functional pragmatism becoming unintentional aesthetic.
He explained it simply. “You're going to get sort of a ‘90s emo theme out of that.”
So the first generation of Martians may resemble something between a spacefaring sports team and a band poster from the 90s. And maybe that is fitting. Maybe those aesthetic accidents will become the first threads in a future Martian fashion identity.
Accessories will carry the emotional load. “We accessorize,” Karl said. “So there are small items of jewelry, timepieces or watches, eyeglasses.” Lightweight objects that can be swapped and treasured and used to signal the variations of self in a world where the outer layers match. Martian fashion won’t be glamorous in the Earthly sense. But that doesn’t mean it will be ugly—or boring.
My favorite moment in our conversation came when Karl described the ritualistic side of clothing in isolated environments. Ships. Antarctic stations. Submarines.
“This is like a security event that you can let off some steam with,” he said. Something playful. Something silly. A moment when clothing becomes release.
He told me about crews who celebrated New Year’s Eve in costumes. Sailors crossing the equator in absurd outfits. Adults in hula skirts. Soldiers in improvised disguises. The ways humans reach for joy, even in places that do not invite it.
Then he imagined Mars.
“There may actually be, as part of the commissary on your base, a costume store,” he said. “Hey, I'm getting married next week. I gotta go rent an outfit from the quartermaster. I need the clown suit.”
There is something deeply human in that. A clown suit on Mars. A reminder that celebration is not optional. It is essential.
Hygiene, Habit, and Mental Health
Then there’s the question of hygiene. In a closed-loop habitat, water is precious. Laundry, as we know it, may not exist. The clothes we design for Mars must be antimicrobial, odor-resistant, and psychologically comforting even when worn for days on end.
But Aspelund is interested in more than just cleanliness. He’s thinking about ritual.
What happens when that ritual disappears? When your clothes never change, because your body never leaves the habitat, because the day outside is unlivable?
These are the kinds of questions Aspelund wants designers to ask—not after launch, but now, while there’s still time to build emotional intelligence into the wardrobe of the future.
“There is no solution for laundry in space right now,” Karl said. “The dirty laundry goes in a bag, it goes out the airlock and it burns up on reentry. That can't happen. That's losing a resource out the window.”
This single reality reshapes everything about undergarments, base layers, and hygiene routines. Water is scarce. Energy is limited. Fabrics must remain wearable long after they would be considered unusable on Earth.
Human beings, as Karl reminded me, are human beings. “Smell matters.”
And so Martian clothing designers must consider the extreme problem: how do you keep people hygienic in a world where washing machines do not exist?
This is where Karl’s voice lit up with excitement.
Lanolin and Longevity
Wool, as it turns out, may be the most ideal fabric for Mars—and also the one we’re least likely to have.
It’s light. It insulates naturally. It resists odor with almost magical efficiency. It breathes well, traps heat in microscopic air pockets, and rarely needs washing. It's soft enough to live in and tough enough to endure months of wear without breaking down. In short, it’s everything you’d want in a garment for long-duration life in space. And yet, there’s one small problem: sheep.
There won’t be any on Mars. Not for a very long time.
Which is why, according to Aspelund, the future of Martian fashion may depend on something else entirely—recreating wool from scratch.
He describes how textile scientists have spent decades getting closer to the properties of plant and animal fibers using synthetics like polyethylene and polyester. But it’s not just about ingredients. It’s about structure—mimicking the microscopic geometry of wool at the molecular level. Its spiral-crimped fibers naturally form air pockets that warm quickly and trap heat close to the skin. Its lanolin coating, a natural wax produced by sheep, repels water, resists odor, and makes the fabric nearly self-cleaning. It’s nature’s technical fabric, and it asks for very little in return.
“Don’t wash wool,” Aspelund jokingly, yet firmly, cautions me on our call. Overwashing it, in fact, can strip away its magical properties. The secret handshake of wool care is deceptively simple: rinse it in cold water, hang it to dry, and let it breathe. No chemicals. No fuss.
In a world where water is precious, and laundry is a luxury, wool would be a revelation.
He recalls testing a prototype merino t-shirt for an entire summer—kayaking, sweating, rinsing it at night, wearing it again the next day. No odor. No breakdown. No fading. It was, by the end of the season, as fresh and functional as the day it arrived.
The tragedy is simple. “There’s one small problem,” he reminded me. Sheep.
There will be none on Mars for quite a long time.
So scientists must build a synthetic fiber that behaves like wool. A fiber that breathes, insulates, and resists odors, all while being fully recyclable.
If we can pull that off, Mars will change not only how we think about clothing, but how we think about sustainability on Earth.
“If you replicate those structures down to the molecular level and the structural level and the cross-sectional level of the fiber itself, you start to get plastic fibers that mimic very closely what those animal and plant fibers can do.”
It’s hard not to see wool, in this light, as more than a material. It’s a metaphor. A kind of tactile ideal—quiet, resilient, low-maintenance, long-lasting. Something that does its job so well you hardly think about it at all.
And for a future lived in pressurized corridors and recycled air, there’s something comforting in that. A promise woven into the fabric itself: you’re going to be okay.
What Goes Around Comes Around
Near the end of our conversation, Karl’s mind turned toward Earth, toward the problems we have created here and the strange way Mars might help us solve them. He shifted into a kind of excited pragmatism, the voice of someone who has spent years staring at the same knot and suddenly sees a way it might come undone.
“We live near Narragansett Bay,” he said, and he described the water in a way that made it feel like both a resource and a warning. A place filled not just with fish and tide patterns, but with all the things humans have let slip through their fingers. Ghost nets. Buoys. Broken fragments of plastic bottles. Stripped rope. Invisible threads of debris drifting through the currents. Not trash, in Karl’s framing, but potential.
He painted the picture of teams pulling these fragments from the bay, sorting them, washing them, turning them back into raw material. Plastic waste that becomes pellets. Pellets that become fibers. Fibers that can be spun into something new. Clothing reborn from the wreckage of the old world. It is not science fiction, he reminded me. “All the technology is there, all the science is there.”
That was the part he kept returning to. We already know how to do this. We do not need new physics or wild breakthroughs. We need will. We need systems. We need to accept that the future will require us to close loops we have been content to leave open for too long.
“If we can actually manage to do that,” he said, “we've created a model for a solution.”
A model that does not require continents or factories or endless resources. A model that fits inside a shipping container. A machine at one end of the habitat that takes in plastic waste and spits out the raw ingredients of a t-shirt. A system small enough to sit beside an airlock, powerful enough to sustain a colony.
He imagined teams on Mars feeding damaged equipment, broken containers, and cracked food packaging into the hopper. The machine hums. The polymers melt. Fibers emerge. Clothing is cut. Garments are repaired. Nothing is lost. Nothing is abandoned to the void.
This is zero waste, not as aspiration but as necessity. A loop that never breaks because the cost of a break on Mars is measured in lives.
And then Karl said something that snapped the whole picture into focus. “If you solve it for Mars,” he said, “you've solved it for Massachusetts.”
It was more than a clever line. It was a thesis for the entire century ahead. Mars becomes testbed. Earth becomes beneficiary. The planet we reach teaches us how to care for the planet we left.
It is a poetic inversion. For centuries, Earth has taught Mars everything it knows. Navigation. Geology. Engineering. But in the decades to come, Mars may return the favor. The colony’s survival systems may become Earth’s rehabilitation systems. The fabric of Mars may help us reweave the fabric of home.
It is not the dream of technological triumph that makes this compelling. It is the reminder that survival, whether in a Rhode Island bay or on a planet bathed in cosmic radiation, asks the same question:
What do we keep?
What, if anything, do we waste?
And what do we choose to give back?
Mars sharpens those questions until they are impossible to ignore. And if we answer them there, maybe we finally learn how to answer them here.
Signal Received
Martian fashion is not a novelty. It is a map of the future. A way of understanding how humans adapt when everything familiar falls away. Clothing becomes the first architecture we inhabit, the cultural baseline from which everything else grows.
Karl Aspelund reminded me through every part of our conversation that clothing is not just practical. It is emotional. It is ritual. It is memory. It is identity in its softest, closest form.
On Mars, the first homes we live in will not be habitats or domes. They will be the garments we put on each morning, the textures we trust against our skin, the pieces we mend and re-mend and pass on.
And someday, a child born on Mars may run a hand over the sleeve of a coat repaired a dozen times and ask where it came from.
And the answer will be simple.
It came with us.
It kept us warm.
It carried our stories.
And now it carries yours. *
Adapted from Joe Sweeney’s interview with Dr. Karl Aspelund for the Aspiring Martians: Everyday Mars episode titled "Martian Fashion" which aired on 29 April 2025.