[Elias Nordling]

I thought this was interesting!

Did you know?

47 years ago today, the space suits used to walk on the Moon were first tested in space. Their design history features a famous fashion designer that should have been tried as a war criminal. To quote the Wikipedia article:
Hugo Boss was born in Metzingen, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, to Luise (née Münzenmayer) and Heinrich Boss, the youngest of five children. He did an apprenticeship as a merchant, completed military service from 1903 to 1905 and worked in a weaving mill in Konstanz. He then took over as the heir to his parents' lingerie shop in Metzingen in 1908. In that year he also married Anna Katharina Freysinger with whom he had a daughter. In 1914 he enlisted in the army and he served through World War I with the rank of corporal.

Hugo Boss company
He founded his own clothing company in Metzingen in 1923 and then a factory in 1924 (initially with two partners). The company produced shirts and jackets and then work clothing, sportswear and raincoats. In the 1930s it produced uniforms for the SA, the SS,[2] the Hitler Youth, the postal service, rail employees and later the Wehrmacht.

Support of Nazism
Boss joined the Nazi Party in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power.[3] By the third quarter of 1932, the all-black SS uniform (to replace the SA brown shirts) was designed by SS-Oberführer Prof. Karl Diebitsch and Walter Heck (graphic designer).[2] Hugo Boss company produced these black uniforms along with the brown SA shirts and the black-and-brown uniforms of the Hitler Youth.[4][5] Some workers are acknowledged to have been French and Polish prisoners of war forced into labour.[6][7] In 1999, US lawyers acting on behalf of Holocaust survivors started legal proceedings against the Hugo Boss company over the use of slave labour during the war.[8] The misuse of 140 Polish and 40 French forced workers led to an apology by the company.[9]

Surrender to the Americans
The Soviet Army was about 160 km (99 mi) from Metzingen in the spring of 1945 when Hugo Boss assembled his planning staff and asked them to decide how and to whom they should surrender. Afraid of the well-known Soviet cruelty to prisoners of war, Boss and his staff decided to try to surrender to the Americans.
On May 2, 1945, upon finding an American private from the U.S. 44th Infantry Division, Hugo Boss approached the soldier on a bicycle, calling out in broken English: "My name is Hugo Boss. I designed the handsome Nazi Uniforms. We want to surrender."
The American high command was well aware of how important their catch was: Hugo Boss was on the Black List, the code name for the list of German scientists, engineers and fashion designers targeted for immediate interrogation by U.S. military experts. On June 19, 1945, two days before the scheduled handover of the area to the Soviets, U.S. Army Major Robert B. Staver, Chief of the Jet Propulsion Section of the Research and Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in London, and Lt Col R. L. Williams took Boss and his department chiefs by jeep from Garmisch to Munich. The group was flown to Nordhausen, and was evacuated 40 miles (64 km) southwest to Witzenhausen, a small town in the American Zone, the next day. Boss was briefly detained at the "Dustbin" interrogation center at Kransberg Castle where the elite of the Third Reich's economy, science and fashion scene were debriefed by U.S. and British intelligence officials. Initially he was recruited to the U.S. under a program called Operation Overcast, subsequently known as Operation Paperclip.

U.S. Army career
On June 20, 1945, the U.S. Secretary of State approved the transfer of Hugo Boss and his specialists to America; however, this was not announced to the public until October 1, 1945. Boss was among those technical specialists for whom the U.S. Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency created false employment histories and expunged Nazi Party memberships and regime affiliations from the public record. Once "bleached" of their Nazism, the U.S. Government granted the specialists security clearance to work in the United States.

Finally, Boss and his remaing staff were transferred to their new home at Fort Bliss, a large Army installation just north of El Paso. Boss would later write he found it hard to develop a "genuine emotional attachment" to his new surroundings. His chief design engineer Walther Reidel became the subject of a December 1946 article "German Fashion Designer Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Nylon stockings", exposing the presence of Boss's team in the country and drawing criticism from Claire McCardell and Christian Dior. Requests to improve their living conditions such as adding satin curtains to the windows were denied. Hugo Boss remarked, "...at Metzingen we had been coddled, here you were counting pennies..."  The US Army never bothered to respond to Boss's request for finer materials, and every proposal for new uniforms were dismissed.

While there, they trained military, industrial, and university personnel in the intricacies of proper uniform care. As part of the Hermes Project, they helped refurbish, assemble, and try out a number of SS uniforms that had been shipped from Germany to New Mexico. They also continued to study the future potential of uniform improvement for military and fashion purposes. Since they were not permitted to leave Fort Bliss without military escort, Boss and his colleagues began to refer to themselves only half-jokingly as "PoPs" - "Prisoners of Peace."

In 1950, at the start of the Korean War, Boss and his team were transferred to Huntsville, Alabama, his home for the next 20 years. Between 1952 and 1956, Boss led the Army's Uniform development team at Redstone Arsenal, resulting in the so called Redstone Uniform, which was used for the West Point officer School parade in 1956. He personally witnessed this historic parade.
Despite the work on the Redstone Uniform, the 12 years from 1945 to 1957 were probably some of the most frustrating for Hugo Boss and his colleagues. In the Soviet Union, Ivan Santlaurevich and his team of scientists and designers plowed ahead with several radical new uniform designs, while the American government was not very interested in Boss' work or views and only embarked on a very modest uniform design program. In the meantime, the press tended to dwell on Boss' past as a member of the SS and the slave labor used to sew Nazi uniforms.[citation needed]

NASA career
In 1957, with the launch of Sputnik 1, a growing belief within the United States existed that it was lagging behind the Soviet Union in the emerging Space Race. American authorities then chose to use Boss and his German team's experience with durable military grade fashion to create a space suit.

NASA was established by law on July 29, 1958. Two years later, NASA opened the Marshall Space Flight Center at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, and the development team led by Boss was transferred to NASA. In a face-to-face meeting with Herb York at the Pentagon, Boss made it clear he would go to NASA only if development of the Space Suit was allowed to follow his vision of fashionable spacewear. Presiding from July 1960 to February 1970, Hugo Boss became the center's lead fashion designer.

The Marshall Center's first major program was the development of Saturn rockets to carry heavy payloads into and beyond Earth orbit. From this, the Apollo program for manned moon flights was developed. Boss initially pushed for a rubber space suit concept, but in 1962, he converted to the hybrid-rigid concept that was subsequently realized.

The basic design of the Apollo suit was a one piece, five-layer "torso-limb" suit with convoluted joints made of synthetic and natural rubber at the shoulders, elbows, wrist, hips, ankle, and knee joints. Rubber was chosen for its durability, elasticity and its matte finish. "Link-net" meshing prevented the suit from ballooning at the joints in an unseemly way, and a shoulder "cable block" assembly allowed the shoulder to be extended and retracted by its wearer. Metal rings at the neck and forearms allowed for the connection of the pressure gloves, a concession to function over fashion. The famous Apollo "fishbowl helmet" was on the insistence of Boss as it allowed an unrestricted view, as well as providing a futuristic aesthetic. All Apollo suits featured a vertical zipper that went from the shoulder assembly of the suit down to the crotch for donning and doffing the suit. Under the suit, the astronauts had matching design underwear.

During Apollo, he worked closely with former Metzingen teammate, Kurt H. Debus, the first director of the Kennedy Space Center. His dream to help mankind set foot on the Moon wearing a fashionable outfit became a reality on July 16, 1969, when a Marshall-developed Saturn V rocket launched the crew of Apollo 11 on its historic eight-day mission.

[Elias Nordling]

Meh!

[Mats Eden]

Que? 

[Elias Nordling]

JAG tyckte det var jätteroligt att göra en Wikipedia-mashup mellan Hugo Boss och Verner von Braun till 1 april. Min sambo tyckte den var rolig men väldigt uppenbar. Få andra verkar ha fattat.

[Wes]

Jag köpte det.
Känns inte direkt som ett aprilskämt då det mesta du skrev om Hugo Boss är fakta.


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[Elias Nordling]

Fram till Captured by the americans är det Hugo Boss rakt av. Efter det är det Werner von Braun där raketer är utbytta mot mode. Jag tyckte det här var roligt:

"My name is Hugo Boss. I designed the handsome Nazi Uniforms. We want to surrender."

The American high command was well aware of how important their catch was: Hugo Boss was on the Black List, the code name for the list of German scientists, engineers and fashion designers targeted for immediate interrogation by U.S. military experts.

Boss was briefly detained at the "Dustbin" interrogation center at Kransberg Castle where the elite of the Third Reich's economy, science and fashion scene were debriefed by U.S. and British intelligence officials.

"German Fashion Designer Says American Cooking Tasteless; Dislikes Nylon stockings"

While there, they trained military, industrial, and university personnel in the intricacies of proper uniform care. As part of the Hermes Project, they helped refurbish, assemble, and try out a number of SS uniforms that had been shipped from Germany to New Mexico. They also continued to study the future potential of uniform improvement for military and fashion purposes.

In the Soviet Union, Ivan Santlaurevich and his team of scientists and designers plowed ahead with several radical new uniform designs, while the American government was not very interested in Boss' work or views and only embarked on a very modest uniform design program.

In a face-to-face meeting with Herb York at the Pentagon, Boss made it clear he would go to NASA only if development of the Space Suit was allowed to follow his vision of fashionable spacewear. Presiding from July 1960 to February 1970, Hugo Boss became the center's lead fashion designer.

Rubber was chosen for its durability, elasticity and its matte finish. "Link-net" meshing prevented the suit from ballooning at the joints in an unseemly way, and a shoulder "cable block" assembly allowed the shoulder to be extended and retracted by its wearer. Metal rings at the neck and forearms allowed for the connection of the pressure gloves, a concession to function over fashion. The famous Apollo "fishbowl helmet" was on the insistence of Boss as it allowed an unrestricted view, as well as providing a futuristic aesthetic. All Apollo suits featured a vertical zipper that went from the shoulder assembly of the suit down to the crotch for donning and doffing the suit. Under the suit, the astronauts had matching design underwear.

[Wes]

Det är bra skrivet Elias men tyvärr så läste jag inte hela utan ögna bara snabbt igenom.


Skickat från min iPhone med Tapatalk

[Elias Nordling]

Lätt hänt. Det är 90 procent Wikipedia trots allt.

[Mats Eden]

Du fick mig... 

[aegneus]

Lysande! Lurade mig - och då satt jag ändå och tyckte att det var väldigt likt vBraun-historien.

[Folket]

Jag var inte kritisk nog men tyckte det inte stämde överens med vad jag visste om rymddräkterna.

[jerry]

jodå visst blev man lurad.... men visst var väl hugo boss involverad i nasse-uniformerna ??

[Elias Nordling]

Absolut! Det var därför, när jag fick frågan "Vet du vem som gjorde Apollo-rymddräkten" direkt tänkte Hugo Boss! Sen gick jag och fnissade åt en mashup mellan honom och Verner von Braun, och amerikanska armens högteknologiska uniformslabb.