When Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon in July 1969, he wore a spacesuit fashioned by Playtex, the bra and girdle company. Playtex seamstresses assembled all the Apollo suits from 21 layers of flexible fabric, latex and reinforcements — a design that won out over the armorlike suits of interlocking components that military-industrial contractors were offering.
In 21 chapters, one for each layer, de Monchaux, an architecture professor at the University of California, Berkeley, makes the case that spacesuit design reflected changing ideas at the time about architecture, fashion and popular culture.
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