The Fashion of the Fifth Dimension

“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”

-Rod Serling, 1959

A young man is sitting on a bus, gripping a paper still warm from the printer. He’s groomed to perfection: a pressed Oxford shirt, hair perfectly coiffed. Sweat droplets threaten to spill down his temples as he looks outside. For the next 20 minutes, his world is a 24 by 24 inch window.

As the motion lulls him into a daydream, a horrific image flashes across the glass and demands his attention. He looks around, wondering if anyone else saw, but he is alone. Leaning in closer, he looks again. He is assaulted with the same image, a face so hideous it’s physically repulsive. Involuntarily, he draws closer. The bloodshot eyes, the bulging veins, the protruding snout, a face too contorted to be a mask and too horrific to be untrue — a perfect example of man playing God and losing.

He twists to see better; it moves too. He raises his hand; it mirrors him. He draws closer and closer until his nose presses the glass, and they both scream — the creature in the window is him. His reason is assaulted. His sanity is on trial. The man’s next stop: The Twilight Zone.

An episode of “The Twilight Zone” always begins something like this. The unsuspecting audience is invited by the show’s dapper host, Rod Serling, to enter this strange new world. People can’t help but find themselves taking Serling’s outstretched hand (metaphorically speaking) and leaping headfirst into the “fifth dimension” with him. “The Twilight Zone” instantly woos with its words, but most don’t realize the importance of the other aspects that created this horrible, yet beautiful, universe, so ahead of its time that it’s still relevant and referenced today (“Black Mirror,” anyone?). But before one can truly understand what “The Twilight Zone” is, one must first analyze what actually makes up this world — and anyone in fashion can tell you that the first step in creating a world is choosing the aesthetic and the fashion.

While most immediately associate “The Twilight Zone” with its revolutionary ideas, its criminally underappreciated aesthetic and costuming seem to have fallen into a sort of Twilight Zone themselves. Airing in the transition from the austere, straight-laced ‘50s to the early, sexy ‘60s, the fashion of “The Twilight Zone” was understandably overlooked as it fell into the “pit of man’s” forgetfulness. However, as Serling states in the opening monologue, both the show’s words and fashion successfully traipse across the “middle ground” between light and shadow. Although the show’s reliance on black and white color was the only feasible option in the still-young TV industry (color was often double the price of black and white in the ‘50s), what should have been a TV industry growing pain became the show’s staple. Black-and-white complemented the show’s elegant yet eerie aura and now the two are inseparable. Though it may be the dimension of imagination, in “The Twilight Zone,” you think in black and white.

The iconic opening monologue always began the same way. The legendary Serling, dressed to the nines, would invite audiences of all kinds to enter his creepy world. His tight black suits, perfectly slicked-back black hair and iconic bushy eyebrows ushered in a new era of smarmy, yet intellectual, gentlemen. To some, he was the “diabolical” Dapper Dan. Smart was sexy. He’d undress you with his eyes as he dove deeper inside your mind. Entering the middle ground “between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge” was never easy, but that didn’t mean that you couldn’t look good doing it.

Not to be overshadowed, the women of “The Twilight Zone” also have their unique fashion. The show was one of the first to showcase the changing styles in women’s clothing. As the seasons went on, skirts got shorter, dresses got tighter and cleavage came to the forefront of the “dimension of imagination.” In its forward-thinking writing, Serling and the writing team were some of the first to create more multidimensional roles for women, allotting them more interesting, and in some cases otherworldly, costumes. Women were witches, aliens and ghosts. They tried to save the world or their families, they sucked the souls of their rivals, they murdered their enemies and in one case, even lived forever.

In arguably the most recognizable episode of the series, “Eye of the Beholder,” a woman is costumed in tight bandages for the majority of the scenes. She is trapped and suspended in her own private world, which only extends to the length, width and texture of the bandages tightly swaddling her face. She laments her perceived disfigurement, which is unseen by the audience. Only at the end does the audience see that her “disfigurement” is a traditional perception of beauty to us. The doctors who took care of her and had been shrouded in shadow for the majority of the episode are revealed to be horrifically disfigured, akin to the initial description of the monster. By comparison, the beautiful woman is the hideous one in this universe, and “The Twilight Zone” uses her self-hatred to warn that beauty is simply a perception — a deviation does not mean disfigurement. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and looks often belie what’s underneath; important lessons to be learned, even in “The Twilight Zone.”

Commentaries like this, along with the fashion and aesthetic of the show, do more than just create a new universe; they underscore the changing values of the time. There’s a great discrepancy between the forward-thinking nature of the content, the social commentaries and the outdated black-and-white aesthetic used to portray them. However, this idea of a discrepancy is not unique to the ‘50s and ‘60s. Perhaps we are encountering no greater discrepancy, or Twilight Zone, in the present.

Despite the “beauty” of today’s society, there will always be an “ugly” underbelly. What we think we see and our actual reflections often tell very different stories. In its time, “The Twilight Zone” served as a much needed mirror to society. As it entertained, it warned, and many of its lessons are still applicable to this day. Perhaps, one day, we will heed its many lessons.

After he screams, the man on our bus recognizes the monster in the mirror, and he sits back in silence. With a deep breath, he reaches for the pull-cord, and the bus stops. He decides to walk instead. As he rejoins the sidewalk, he turns around and sees the monster reflected in the window, growing hazier and less hideous with each step. He smiles. He can now face the future with confidence, knowing he has escaped one of the darker places of the Twilight Zone.