Lifestyle
How Lauren Sanchez Helped Design Blue Origin’s Flight Suits
What do you wear for your first trip to space?
If you are like most people, probably whatever spacesuit or astronaut outfit the company (or government agency) you are flying with provides. However, if you are Lauren Sánchez — journalist, pilot, children’s book author, philanthropist and fiancée of Jeff Bezos, the second-richest man on the planet — you have another idea. You think, “Let’s reimagine the flight suit.”
“Usually, you know, these suits are made for a man,” Ms. Sánchez said recently on a video call from the West Coast. “Then they get tailored to fit a woman.” Or not tailored: an all-female spacewalk, planned in 2019, had to be canceled because NASA did not have two spacesuits that fit two women. (Instead they sent out one woman and one man.)
But Ms. Sánchez is part of the first all-female flight since Russia sent Valentina Tereshkova on a solo flight in 1963. She will be going up on a Blue Origin flight with a pop star (Katy Perry), a journalist (Gayle King), two scientist/activists (Amanda Nguyen, Aisha Bowe) and a film producer (Kerianne Flynn). Feeling like yourself is what makes you feel powerful, she said, and you shouldn’t have to sacrifice that because space has been — well, a mostly male space. Even if you are a space tourist, rather than a full-fledged astronaut.
So five months ago, Ms. Sánchez got in touch with Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim, the co-founders of the brand Monse, who are also creative directors of Oscar de la Renta (Mr. Garcia and Ms. Kim made Ms Sánchez’s 2024 Met Gala outfit). She wanted to know if they would work with Blue Origin, Mr. Bezos’ space company.
“I was like: right away!” Mr. Garcia said over Zoom.
The result of their collaboration will be unveiled on Monday, when Ms. Sánchez and crew climb into the Blue Origin rocket in West Texas, and take off for their approximately 11-minute trip past the Kármán line and into zero gravity.
“I think the suits are elegant,” Ms. Sánchez said, “but they also bring a little spice to space.”
When Gayle King tried hers on, she said, she loved it. She thought the suits looked “professional and feminine at the same time.”
Which, when it came to space, happened to be “something we had never seen before,” she said.
The Monse Blue Origin suits, which were produced by Creative Character Engineering, look like a cross between “Star Trek” (on top) and the outfits Elvis wore in his Vegas years (on the bottom) and are made of a flame-resistant stretch neoprene, rather than the shiny polyester-looking fabric of the original, baggier, Blue Origin suits, as modeled by Mr. Bezos on a flight in 2021. (Ms. Sánchez helped design those suits as well.)
Still, “We really didn’t know where to start,” Mr. Garcia said. “There’s no precedent. All the references are men’s spacesuits.”
Because Blue Origin fliers do not go out into space, Mr. Garcia and Ms. Kim did not need to incorporate the life-support system of the classic astronaut suit, but they still had to work within technical specifications.
“Simplicity was important, and comfort, and fit,” Mr. Garcia said. “But we also wanted something that was a little dangerous, like a motocross outfit. Or a ski suit. Flattering and sexy.”
Ms. Kim added: “I, personally, would want to look very slim and fitted in my outfit.”
They batted ideas back and forth with Ms. Sánchez. “We even had a meeting on what underwear Lauren is going to wear,” Mr. Garcia said.
“Skims!” Ms. Sánchez responded.
The result is a body-con jumpsuit, with a compression layer, a slight mandarin collar, a dual-zip front that can look like it is open to the waist, a belt, and a zipper on the side of each calf, so the wearer can create a flared effect according to their own taste. “You’ll be able to zip or unzip,” Mr. Garcia said. (Ms. King said she liked the bell-bottom idea.)
The suits also feature a darker, ombre effect on the sides that works to shade the body, almost like trompe l’oeil. There are small pockets on the arms, but leg pockets were dropped because they were too bulky, Ms. Kim said. Every crew member was three-D body-scanned so the suits could be made exactly to their measurements.
“I almost put a corset in your suit, because I know you wouldn’t have been against it,” Mr. Garcia said to Ms. Sánchez.
“I probably wouldn’t have,” she said. But “we’re going to be in zero gravity. So we have to be able to move.” When Ms. Sánchez first tried the prototype on, she said, “I was stretching. I was doing a back bend. I was like, ‘OK, let’s make sure it doesn’t split up the back in space.’”
Mr. Garcia said when he saw the suit on he thought, “Damn, you look good. You’re going up in space looking hot.”
Amanda Nguyen called the suits “revolutionary.” Clothes are about identity and representation, she said, and by allowing women to look like women, the suits are a statement that “women belong in space.”
Blue Origin is not the first private space company to enlist a fashion brand for help in outfit design. Axiom Space has also been working with Prada on their Extravehicular Mobility Unit spacesuit, otherwise known as the suit that NASA’s astronauts will wear when they walk on the moon during the Artemis III mission in 2026 (prototypes were revealed last October). Similarly, Elon Musk worked with the costume designer Jose Fernandez, the man behind the ‘fits of “The Fantastic Four” and “The Avengers,” on the SpaceX suits.
As to why fashion designers were suddenly so popular with the astrophysics set, Mr. Garcia said, “if we make suits look approachable and like something anyone could wear, then space might feel a little bit less distant.” Maybe, Mr. Garcia said, when people saw the Monse Blue Origin style, they might even think they “want to buy that spacesuit to go to the gym.”
In fact, he went on, he and Ms. Kim were thinking they might “set up an office on Mars.” In both cases, he was joking. Sort of.
It turned out Mr. Garcia, Ms. Kim and Ms. Sánchez were already working on something else for Blue Origin, related to “the moon.” Blue Origin has been selected by NASA to develop the human landing system for the Artemis V mission to the Moon, but Ms. Sánchez would not say if Monse would have anything to do with that.
She was, however, excited to give space travel a new look.
“This isn’t what you would call ‘normal,’ but neither is sending six women into space,” she said. “If you want to do glam, great; if you don’t, great.” The point was everyone gets to choose.
Then she quoted something she said Katy Perry had told her: “We’re putting the ‘ass’ in astronaut,” she said.
Sunday Puzzle
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This week’s challenge
Today’s puzzle is a tribute to Mimi. Every answer is a familiar two word phrase or name in which each word starts with the letters MI-.
Ex. Assignment for soldiers –> MILITARY MISSION
1. Pageant title for a contestant from Detroit
2. One of the Twin Cities
3. Nickname for the river through New Orleans
4. Super short skirt
5. Neighborhood in Los Angeles that contains Museum Row
6. Just over four times the distance from the earth to the moon
7. Goateed sing-along conductor of old TV
8. American financier who pioneered so-called “junk bonds”
9. Little accident
10. Land-based weapon in America’s nuclear arsenal
11. In “Snow White,” the evil queen’s words before “on the wall”
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge comes from Benita Rice, of Salem, Ore. Name a famous foreign landmark (5,4). Change the eighth letter to a V and rearrange the result to make an adjective that describes this landmark. What landmark is it?
Answer
Notre Dame –> Renovated
Winner
Chee Sing Lee of Bangor, Maine
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from James Ellison, of Jefferson City, Mo. Think of a popular movie of the past decade. Change the last letter in its title. The result will suggest a lawsuit between two politicians of the late 20th century — one Republican and one Democrat. What’s the movie and who are the people?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, April 23 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
This story is part of Image’s April’s Thresholds issue, a tour of L.A. architecture as it’s actually experienced.
A landmark is a landmark because it tells you that you’re home now — the piece of earth you’ve chosen to inhabit saying, “You’ve made it back, congratulations.” We identify our cities with their landmarks, and because we identify with our cities, we identify with the landmarks too. They are us and we are them, mirroring each other through eternity. A city like New York or Chicago, with the Chrysler Building, the Bean, etc., has landmarks that exist in the world’s popular consciousness. But L.A.’s most cherished landmarks belong to us and us alone, a secret you’re let in on if you live here long enough and pay attention.
The Fashion Nova baddie in horizontal sprawl off the Vertigo, for example, is an emblem for those in the know. Our twisted version of a capitalist guardian angel, patron saint of spandex in a cropped matching set. Welcome to El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Fashion Nova. Merging on the 110 South from the 10 East while the sunset burns and traffic thickens is a miracle in more ways than one, and in the spirit of compulsively performing the sign of the cross when you pass a church on the freeway, this billboard is deserving of its own acknowledgment.
It may not be the landmark L.A. asked for, but in Sayre Gomez’s painting “Vertigo,” you begin to understand why it’s the one we deserve. At the opening for “Precious Moments,” Gomez’s solo show at David Kordansky, the room was vibrating. A game of energetic ping-pong unfolded underneath the gallery’s fluorescent light, beams of identification, recollections or stabs of grief bouncing off each piece in the exhibition. People were seeing hyperspecific parts of a city they love reflected in a hyperspecific way — for better and for worse. Recognition has two edges and they both happen to be sharp. Gomez twists the knife deeper for a good cause: He wants you not just to look but to really see.
In his work exist iconic signs of beloved local establishments — like the Playpen — the blinding glint reflecting off downtown’s skyline, telephone poles regarded as totems. The line to see Gomez’s replica of L.A.’s graffiti towers, “Oceanwide Plaza,” snaked through the gallery’s courtyard. Once inside, at least three graffiti writers whose names were blasted on the replica pointed it out proudly, even gave out stickers to take home. The truth can be beautiful and it can be ugly — in this case it’s both — on the flip side showing up in the form of smog, tattered flags and an abandoned graffiti tower that starkly represents the pitfalls of capitalism and greed, a neon arrow pointing to the homelessness crisis.
Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave.
— Sayre Gomez
In the main gallery, I was stuck on “Vertigo.” On the 12-foot canvas, my eye went to the place out of focus: the thin strip of billboard in the background featuring a young woman with sand-dune hips, patent knee-high boots and long black hair laid up on her side, wearing cat ears and a tiger bodysuit as flush as second skin. The model made the kind of eye contact that felt dangerous — might cause an accident if you’re not careful. “#1 Halloween Destination … FASHION NOVA,” it read. I knew her, anyone who has driven through the two main arteries of Los Angeles knows her. The black-and-white smiley motif of the Vertigo, an events space, sat right next to her face, just happy to be there, it seemed, above a painted sign that says “Ready to Party?”
The sky was the color of cotton candy, but the stale kind that’s been hardening in a plastic bag for days after the fair. Something rancid about it. In the foreground of the painting was a car encampment with a tattered floral sheet woven through the windows, cloth tarps and couch cushions creating a shield against the elements. Small plastic children’s toys lined at the top of the car — dinosaurs and dump trucks and sharks — creating their own shrunken skyline in front of the Vertigo, signaling that young kids likely lived there. It’s less juxtaposition for juxtaposition’s sake and more an accurate reflection of the breakneck duality of living in a place like L.A.
Even angels exist within the context of their environments. Our Fashion Nova baddie hangs off the Vertigo, a building that has used its ad space as physical clickbait and political posturing for over a decade. It’s promoting the kind of fast fashion brand that’s been regarded as a case study on the industry’s environmental impact. In the years the billboard has been up, it’s looked over dozens and dozens of car encampments like the one depicted in Gomez’s piece.
She feels dubious, yes. But no less like ours.
Julissa James: I’ve lived in L.A. for 13 years now. For me, the city and the architecture of the city is less the Frank Lloyd Wrights and Frank Gehrys — there’s that — but other landmarks that signal, “Oh, I’m home.” The Fashion Nova baddie above the Vertigo has always been that for me. Your piece is layered and there’s so much more to it than just that, but that’s the first thing I saw and was like, “Whoa. I need to talk to Sayre. We need to talk about ‘Vertigo.’”
Sayre Gomez: It’s like L.A.’s Statue of Liberty. It’s the city of anti-landmarks, you know what I mean? I mean, there’s the Hollywood sign, which I think is so telling, because it’s the remnants of a real estate venture. The city is built by real estate schemes and 100 years later we’re feeling the effects of it. You’ve got empty skyscrapers and a massive homeless catastrophe. L.A. doesn’t really have real landmarks. It has anti-landmarks.
JJ: When did the Fashion Nova billboard above the Vertigo click for you as something that felt representative of the city, or something that you wanted to depict?
SG: My studio is in Boyle Heights, so I pass that billboard multiple times a week. This is my 20th year in L.A. and that building’s always been a big mystery to me. It was empty when I moved here before this guy Shawn Farr bought it and turned it into Casa Vertigo. I think he probably makes more money on it with the ad space than anything. I know nobody who has ever been there. Very mysterious to me. So that’s what I was drawn to.
(Paul Salveson from David Kordansky Gallery)
The Vertigo has always been mysterious to me. And that whole fashion industry is mysterious to me — the kind of shmatta, American Apparel-adjacent, or maybe coming out of the wake of that. These kinds of businesses, or the representations of these businesses, how do they function and how do they flourish? Is it aboveboard? What more perfectly encapsulates that than that building? It’s this weird thing you can’t quite figure out but somehow it has a lot of money and then it’s an event space, supposedly billed as that. Clearly it’s this big ad thing, and I’m very interested in the changing dynamics of capital. The capital of yesteryear, which was based on the brick and mortar, where things are being made in a specific location, maybe on an assembly line or in a specific way, to a kind of capital that is based solely on advertising or on viewership. These beautiful buildings acting as pedestals for some kind of ad space, you know? It becomes an anti-landmark for me. Something where I’m like, “Oh, there’s that thing again.”
JJ: It’s this gorgeous Beaux Arts building …
SG: It’s a Freemason building!
JJ: When I’ve talked to some people about the Vertigo, they’re like, “the Fashion Nova building?”
SG: They always have the woman in the same pose — same pose, different clothes. If you remember before Fashion Nova, they would have these provocative ad campaigns or provocative slogans. “Twerk Miley” was up, remember that? They did a Trump one: “TRUMP NOW.” They did one for Kanye when he ran for president. The 10 and the 110 are literally the crossroads of the city, so it’s really poised to be a special building. It has a special designation because of the location.
JJ: Talk to me about the process of doing this piece. Where did it start and how did it evolve?
SG: I was cruising around that vicinity trying to see if I could get a good vantage point to take photos of Vertigo. And then I stumbled upon this car — the car that’s in the foreground of the painting. Anytime I see an encampment that has kids’ toys, things that reference back to the lives of children, it hits hard. But I like to lay it all out there. I like to make things confrontational. I want it to be difficult. The painting isn’t based on a one-to-one photo [Gomez paints from a composite rendering of images he’s taken around town], but I knew that I wanted to use that car, and I knew I wanted to get the Vertigo building, and so I started just messing around with different iterations. I could never find a good angle to take a good photo of the building, so I just went on Vertigo’s website and I was like, “I’m just using these.” I switched the sky and put a more moody, atmospheric sky in.
JJ: Which I loved, because we know that feeling — you’re merging onto the 110 and you see a beautiful sunset. The euphoria of like, “L.A. is the best city in the world.” But you know what? What I found so interesting about your piece is that it was revealing to me about myself, but also about so many of us that live in L.A. and have lived here for years and have developed a jadedness. When I saw your piece, immediately I was like, “Oh my God, the Vertigo! The Vertigo! The Vertigo!” And then I was like, “OK, wait, hold on, there’s so much more going on here.” But the fact that my eye went to that first instead of the car encampment, the kids’ toys, brought up a lot of questions about my own relationship to the city and the things that we choose to see, the things that maybe we’ve seen so much of that we subconsciously filter it out. Why was it important for you to put these two things up against each other in this way?
SG: Because the Vertigo is something everybody who lives here recognizes as central to a sort of framework of Los Angeles. And I think the encampment has become that as well. It’s connecting these integral components — something that’s more revelatory and more fun with something that’s more grave. That’s what I’m doing in my work at large. I use the sunsets and the beauty to create a dialogue, to entice people to sort of look a little bit at how things are contextualized, how things act, what’s actually happening. I don’t make things in a vacuum. I was working on this show and I was going to really push this agenda of incorporating more of my experience with my kids into the work. That’s also a double-edged sword. I wanted to interject some levity, because the work can get so dark. I wanted to bring in some iconography from their world and things that they get excited about. When you’re juxtaposing that with really stark things, it becomes darker. I want to thicken the stock a little bit. Make things a little more complex.
Phil Pritchard of the Hockey Hall of Fame works the 2019 NHL Awards at the Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 19, 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)
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