146. Apollo Spacesuit
- Rainey Knudson
- Aug 2
- 2 min read
The spacesuit worn on the moon was not developed from military-industrial expertise, but from underwear. In the greatest irony of the space race, the most reproduced Apollo artifact—the spacesuit—was a hand-crafted garment made by highly skilled seamstresses, custom fitted to each astronaut. With 21 layers sewn to tolerances of a sixty-fourth of an inch—smaller than a sewing needle’s eye—it was not a piece of NASA engineering, but the ultimate haute couture.
This drove NASA, a bureaucratic entity if there ever was one, crazy. And it almost didn’t happen. ILC, the company best known for Playtex underwear, had pioneered combining latex with nylon in its Cross Your Heart bra in 1957. When ILC threw its hat in the ring to design spacesuits, it was an unlikely underdog in a pool of government contractors. NASA was looking for a company that built aircraft, not girdles.
In test after test, ILC suits outperformed their competitors. But NASA was skeptical of ILC’s “ragged art” based on patterns and feel for fabric, not engineered drawings. In a last-ditch effort to win the contract, ILC produced a suit at its own expense and presented it along with a filmstrip of a subject in the pressurized suit playing football for the duration of a moon landing. Other companies could make a suit that kept a man alive in space, but only ILC could make that suit move. Afterwards, NASA reported: “The ILC suit is in first place. There is no second place.”
This is an extremely condensed summary of the book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, by Nicholas de Monchaux (MIT Press, 2011). Fascinating book; highly recommended.
Links:
“Designing Spacesuits” from Expedition: Fashion from the Extreme – The Museum at FIT, 2017-2018
Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit Was Made by a Bra Manufacturer – Andrew Chaikin, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2013
The Seamstresses Behind the Apollo Spacesuit | Profiles in Sewing History – Dana Finkle, threads, n.d.
This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.
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