the future is now; Sleek cyborg uniforms, technometallics, and sci-fi robo-looks-forget everything you imagined about fashion arriving in 50, 60, 100 years.

Byline: Sarah Mower

It's been called Futurism, but that's wrong. Whatever it is that's exploding from the brains of our best designers at the moment is as hard to capture as the shards of a digital sci-fi sequence spinning into computer space. It's not Futurism, though-just such a new and multidimensional phenomenon that fashion language hasn't caught up. Let the first word go to Nicolas Ghesquiere, who marched out articulated robot legs, armored vests, and freakily new clear-lens sungoggles at Balenciaga: "_'Future' is an excuse," he says, "for 'today.'_" Narciso Rodriguez, who sank car-shiny fiberglass plates into his evening_wear, shrugs at the term: "I'm only interested in today. I want to look at things that haven't been seen before." Meanwhile, Miuccia Prada, whose geometrically planed Miu Miu collection set the mind whirring for comparisons, is insisting she, too, cares only about the present: "I wanted to do clothes that look new to my eyes. I was working without 'inspiration,' in the moment." Hussein Chalayan, after putting forward six astonishing, time-traveling dress machines in his show, sums it up neatly: "Futurism is a retro term. We have to find a new word for it."

Of course, on one level, this pow! bam! shake-up is solely about how desperate you'll be to get your bod into Alber Elbaz's epauletted chrome-yellow Lanvin star-flight-uniform shift, or your feet into those giant metal tank-chain Balenciaga sandals. This is fashion: fast, chic, gleaming, ephemeral. But these clothes also unleash a surge of open-_ended questions about the high-speed technological, social, visual, psychological, medical, and emotional transformations the industry has spent the half-decade largely ignoring. When Nicolas Ghesquiere finds a way to segue from references to fifties haute couture and into imagery clicked and molded together from elements of cyberculture and cars, it counts as a major consciousness shift-all the more exciting for the fact that its dimensions aren't yet measured. "We've had so much nostalgia," he says, "and it's true I was one who was happy with that. But 'prettiness' was becoming a bit too heavy." For Miuccia Prada, the reign of retro is also at an end: "My feeling is that is kind of over. What's new is to do something for now." It's a breakout, then: from the safe haven of the beautiful backward thinking fashion's been hiding in since 9/11, and forward into . . . what?

Narciso Rodriguez, for one, is fired by the mission to reconnect fashion to the advances that have been running through "the technology in our homes, sneaker design, car design. It's the way people live today. I visited a car museum in California. Two hangars full of Porsches. I photographed them all, but most of all there was a black-and-white one from the eighties that reminded me of Darth Vader's storm troopers: that robotic body." Donatella Versace, too, has been getting into cars, transferring something of the spectacular aerodynamic angles of the Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 (whose interior she has just designed as a limited edition) into the slick metallic paillettes sculpting some of her bodices.

In Paris, Ghesquiere started with thinking about sci-fi movies: Tron, the pioneering 1982 merge of computer graphics with real acting; 1984's Terminator; and the designer's recurring favorite, George Lucas's 1977 Star Wars. "Tron is about Jeff Bridges falling into a computer game. It was minimal, graphic with bright colors: The blue dress and orange trousers in the collection came from that," he explains. "But I was also interested in carosserie-car bodywork-and the 'assisted body,' the next step in the human form meeting high-tech. There are incredible medical operations. It's not sci-fi-it's already going on!"

But then: In what senses am I a robot-woman? Apologies for bringing it back to the personal, but fashion is never purely an abstract exercise, however clever a designer's being, and this ...