The Caseback Issue 5: Future Perfect

Hey friends,

Welcome to the fifth issue of The Caseback. This one is about the people who draw the things we use, now and in the future, and it started with a watch I've wanted since I was a kid: the Seiko that Sigourney Weaver wears in Aliens. Just a reminder, this is the weekend edition for paid subscribers. If you're one of them, thank you (if you're not, you can subscribe here). You're paying for something I write on weekends because I can't stop thinking about these stories, and I don't take it lightly.

Ripley's Seiko was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, a car designer from a family of church painters in Piedmont. Between 1977 and 1986, three of his designs ended up in films that needed the future to look believable. There was the Lotus Esprit that turns into a submarine in The Spy Who Loved Me, the DeLorean in Back to the Future, and two Seiko chronographs in Aliens. He hadn't drawn any of them to look futuristic. Every one was a solution to a practical brief. The long read is about why that kind of design looked like the future on screen, and why it now looks exactly like the years it came from.

The rest of the issue follows from there. Your Next Watch is watches designed by people who don't usually design watches, from Porsche's IWC to a G-Shock drawn by Pininfarina. Watch School explains how the movement inside Ripley's Seiko works, and why a quartz chronograph was so difficult to make. Odd One Out is Pierre Cardin's Espace line from the early 1970s, a fashion designer's space age that still sells for a few hundred pounds.

The essay is on Aliens itself. I argue that its future is built out of things you could buy in 1986, and that the film is really about the year it came out. The Carry is the Nikon F3, the camera Giugiaro designed three years before the Seikos and still the film camera I'd tell you to buy. In Dead Seconds I ask why watch brands almost never tell you who designed their watches, when car and camera companies do.

If you're a paid subscriber, the whole issue is below. If you're not, this letter is where it stops for you this week. If you want, you can subscribe here.

-Vuk