This spring, apparently, we will all be dressing like one of Doctor Who's assistants, circa 1967. High-gloss fabrics, which look as though they might first have been designed to protect us from nuclear fallout, have been whipped up into A-line shifts and the miniest of minis.
You might have had a foretaste already, thanks to the ubiquitous patent shoe which shone all through the Christmas party season. Imagine that wet-look finish oozing out over your entire wardrobe, and you begin to get the picture (and, indeed, the reflection of that picture for here is a style that insists on staring right back at you).
At the recent shows, Dolce & Gabbana offered a dress made of what appeared to be liquid metal and teemed it with a pair of oversize goggles, with the result that the model looked as though she was getting ready to do a bit of intergalactic welding.
Meanwhile, at MaxMara and Ralph Lauren the "girls" were sent down the runway in the sort of tunics made out of milk-bottle tops last seen when Captain Kirk beamed down on a planet to meet a lovely handmaiden who was actually 1,000 years old.
The first time around, of course, this way of dressing was a direct response to all the wonderful possibilities that the 1960s "white heat of technology" appeared to offer. Each week the BBC's Tomorrow's World would promise that housecleaning robots and propeller backpacks which allowed you to fly to your next meeting were just around the corner.
This time, the context for high-tech dressing is very different. Gone are the days when science seemed to offer such simple, untainted benefits that the only polite response was to dress as an off-duty astronaut.
These days we may have IVF babies, but we also have green pigs. We have stem-cell research which hopes to offer a cure for Parkinson's disease, but we also have psychometric scanning with its Orwellian implications. We have the promise of intelligent fridges which not only tell you when you're running low on something, but will speed-dial the supermarket to order new supplies; yet we also have global warming, thanks, in large part, to mountains of broken-down fridges.
Against this uneven, cloudy backdrop, the urge to dress up as Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura on a date-night takes on a meaning radically different from the one that applied the first time around.
Instead of being a cheerfully complacent expression of thanks for all the self-evident bounties of science, high-tech dressing in 2007 feels much more like a statement of intent, a gritted-teeth assertion that at least for now we are going to side with the men in white coats.
For it is no accident that the new season's interest in shiny, contact-repelling, man-made fabrics comes immediately after a long love affair with "boho chic".
Over the last three years a large portion of the female population has spent its summers flopping around in clothes which looked as though they had been put together at home with an outsize crochet hook. Here, in spirit if not in fact, was a rejection of the whole industrial-military complex which had managed to produce a senseless war in Iraq and a tsunami that surely had something to do with man-made climate change.
So, choosing now a look that appears to have been designed by the person who came up with Diana Rigg's catsuit in The Avengers is to take a very particular stand. It is the stand of someone who is prepared to give science a second chance, who accepts that the forces that got us into these various messes might just be the ones that could save us too.
Science, though, will have to be quick if it is to continue to carry fashion with it. The autumn/winter collections are already under way and, word is, there isn't a bit of silver foil to be seen.
