IN 1909, THE GODFATHER of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, published his manifesto in Le Figaro, the Paris daily. Glorifying virility, patriotism and war — “the only hygiene for the world” — the Italian poet envisioned a future shaped by speed and technology, but also by “scorn for woman,” and advocated a radical break with the bourgeois conception of the past, including the destruction of libraries and museums. “We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible?”

More than a century later, this sounds quaint (and brutish), but it’s hard not to feel a twinge of tenderness for this wild love of progress, for “deep-chested locomotives” and racing cars “adorned with great pipes, like serpents.” While short-lived (about two decades) and somewhat blurry in principle (Marinetti later became a fascist, then an academician), Futurism would translate into a distinctive visual style with enduring influence, and not only in art. Futurism differed from other Modernist movements, like Cubism, in that it was meant to speak to the way we live, from politics to fashion. It was the Futurist painter Giacomo Balla who set out tenets for clothing design in 1914, promoting bold or even clashing colors, geometric patterns and freedom of movement; banished were symmetry, harmony and tradition. Before ready-to-wear came to dominate the industry, Futurists anticipated that perpetual obsolescence would be at the heart of fashion itself, requiring creativity on the part of designers to provide novelty for the wearer.

Early Futurist fashion could run light: The Modernist designer Sonia Delaunay’s “simultaneous” dresses were floor-length gowns made from variable fabric swatches that the artist began making in 1913, all geometric patchworks of vibrating color combinations — green and gold, red and pink — that resembled a walking Cubist painting. Futurism could also be dark, such as the metal bustier-like chest plate worn by Brigitte Helm as the Maschinenmensch in Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 film about dystopian class struggle, “Metropolis.” It could also be simply utilitarian: In 1919, the Futurist artist and fashion designer Ernesto Michahelles, otherwise known as Thayaht, introduced a commercially successful unisex jumpsuit called the TuTa, from the Italian word “tutta” (meaning “all”). (Thayaht also worked for Vionnet, the creator of the bias-cut dress, with its emphasis on the movement of the body.) It’s not so great a leap from the TuTa to Carhartt overalls or even Yeezy Calabasas sweats, but as Futurism took hold of the 20th-century imagination, it would become less about functionality or technological innovation than our romance with the notion of the future itself: a fantasy of tomorrow for today.

Though the formal movement itself ended, its obsessions endured. In the 1960s, space-age designers like André Courrèges and Paco Rabanne were inspired by the aesthetics of satellites and rockets, resulting in sleek, shimmering minidresses for an era of youthful rebellion. In the 1980s, Thierry Mugler and Jean Paul Gaultier, among others, designed clothes for a new generation of cyberpunk supervixens, inspired by films like “Blade Runner” and “Tron”: a darker, computer-age sexiness that gave us bold shoulders, body-con everything and transparent trench coats. The early aughts found retro-futurism at its most edgily gossamer in Nicolas Ghesquière’s brilliant collections for Balenciaga, including floral dresses with the shape of Jane Jetson’s evening wear, segmented leather pants and gilded leggings that called to mind “Star Wars” Stormtroopers or maybe C-3PO’s girlfriend. These were clothes infused with the optimism of a new millennium and the birth of the digital age: Androids could be lovely, too. All of these dreams of the future, with their built-in expiration dates, have become visual touchstones in their own right, in turn inspiring subsequent designers — exactly the kind of system of historical precedent the original, anti-nostalgia Futurists, with their fixation on the “shock of the new,” would have shunned.

Now that it can feel perilous to look ahead, the fact that contemporary designers are venturing back to the future is more fraught than it was. Ghesquière’s spring 2019 collection for Louis Vuitton was almost quixotically upbeat, featuring floral jacquard flight suits, sci-fi prints of potassium lakes shot by drones and astronaut sleeves. Gucci’s Alessandro Michele referred to the feminist scholar Donna Haraway’s landmark 1984 text, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in his fall 2018 show, in which models carried 3-D prints of their own heads. There were fabulous holographic pants at Balmain’s fall 2018 collection. With the exception of the hazmat suits and balaclavas at the fall 2018 Calvin Klein 205W39NYC show, it felt more or less as though fashion had taken a vow of innocence rather than confront the reality of climate change reports and border walls, presenting us not with an actual vision of the future but rather a longing for a time in which we still could feel hopeful about it. Fashion is, perhaps, not the place for a reckoning, and it never pays to be a literalist. Dystopia is a drag. But those of us wishing for a stimulating, thought-through vision of our present moment might wonder: Is this what we’ll be wearing after we locate the wormhole, or when a SpaceX rocket jettisons the human race en masse to Mars? Will there be nightclubs in our terraformed colony in which to wear the excellent sequined mesh dresses? The problem with breaking down “the mysterious doors of the impossible” is that right now, no one really wants to think too hard about what’s on the other side.

FASHION IS A TERRIFIC time-travel machine. There is a kind of optimism built into the industry that makes the future a recurring theme, a kind of sustained argument that there will always be people who need to make a statement with what they wear. But one of its curious paradoxes is the way in which it can remix the past, or the past’s unique vision of the future, to create something that feels resonantly of the moment. Our current moment has resulted in what one might call an extended spell of beautiful eclecticism, a temporal salad of pasts and futures past. Instead of a coherent reflection of the now, we have an assortment of potent, deeply coded nostalgias: a kind of choose-our-own-era pastiche for troubled times. How, one wonders, can this be a way forward? Nothing and everything is anachronism; nothing and everything looks “vintage.” This is what we wear, one might think while looking at the collections of recent years, as we watch the world spinning gently out of time.

Visions of futures past always feel almost willfully innocent in retrospect. It’s not unlike the feeling of opening an old box and discovering one’s first-grade class photo, when you still thought you’d become an astronaut or win a Nobel Prize. But then, the retro-future is powerful precisely because it reveals to us the faultiness of those dreams, the seductive gap between our fantasies of what we thought the future should look like and what it turned out to be. A replicator should be delivering our meals by now, not Postmates; we should be getting around town by jet pack, not Segway. It’s hard to look back at the midcentury’s miniskirted sexual ebullience knowing that, a decade later, the Equal Rights Amendment would fail and, shortly after that, AIDS would wipe out entire communities. And remember all of the people who, as recently as 10 years ago, thought that the internet would save democracy?

Wishful thinking is a powerful human instinct. In Gene Roddenberry’s sweetly utopian original “Star Trek,” which ran from 1966 to ’69 but was set in 2265 to 2269, the divisions of race and class didn’t exist, nor did sexual harassment. Lieutenant Uhura and Captain Kirk — who would share the first televised interracial kiss, albeit under the influence of telekinesis — worked together in an atmosphere of professionalism and mutual respect. Her uniform as the starship’s communications officer: red micro-miniskirt. (Less sunny cinematic visions of the future tended to come from Europeans who grew up in the aftermath of two apocalyptic wars, like Andrei Tarkovsky and Chris Marker.) By the end of the 1960s, this vision of peace-and-love grooviness didn’t hold up; Vietnam raged on, and the mod no longer seemed revolutionary but campy: a glittery sex-kitten wardrobe to be inflicted upon Jane Fonda in “Barbarella” (1968), in which the titular character comes from an idyllic Earth of the future, a place where war doesn’t exist. Then the 1970s arrived and with it the women’s movement; there were actual dark powers to be fought on the home front and in the professional sphere, and no one wanted to wear a silver lamé bra and bootees while doing it.

But that’s the funny thing about the future: Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, it sprints away, leaving us and our dreams behind. Who could have foreseen then that, in the 21st century, progress wouldn’t be about free love but about sharing stories of oppression? What would Uhura have to say about identity politics? We don’t know if this is fashion’s last gasp of radiant optimism: There very well may be intergalactic peace and equality in the 23rd century. Perhaps women will occupy the majority of seats of power in the United Federation of Planets. Or maybe we’ll still be here on Earth, in our UPF-fabric togas and full-body neoprene: a vision not so unlike that of the young French designer Marine Serre, whose idea of an evening look, as shown in her spring 2019 show, is a sheer scuba suit worn under a luxe scavenger dress made of upcycled silk scarves. Which, come to think of it, might not be a bad thing to be wearing when the sea laps at our doors.