Plutonic Rainbows

Speculative fiction often frames communication with the past as a problem of infrastructure rather than magic. In works such as William Gibson’s The Peripheral, the enabling technology is imagined as an advanced quantum system capable of exchanging information across time, usually by exploiting ideas drawn from quantum mechanics or many-worlds theory. The key move is not literal time travel, but data transfer: messages, control signals, or sensory input passing between eras. This allows the future to talk to the past through networks that resemble an internet stretched across timelines. Crucially, these stories impose rules — no matter crosses the boundary, only information does, and the moment communication begins, a new branch of reality forms. This framing gives the technology a cold, infrastructural plausibility that feels modern and computational rather than fantastical.

However, even within physics-inspired speculation, this idea collapses under closer scrutiny. Quantum mechanics does not permit usable communication backward in time. Quantum entanglement, often invoked in fiction, cannot transmit information at all — let alone into the past — without a classical channel that obeys normal causality. Proposed workarounds, such as closed timelike curves or exotic spacetime geometries, remain mathematical curiosities with no experimental support and, in many cases, imply energy conditions that appear physically impossible. Even if a future civilisation mastered quantum computing far beyond anything imaginable today, it would still be bound by causality as we understand it. At best, speculative models allow correlations across timelines, not conversations with people who already lived, acted, and died in a fixed historical world like 1990.

There is also a more fundamental, and bleaker, barrier: both the finality of causality and the sheer antiquity of the technology that defined 1990. The networks of that era were fragile, local, and transient — dial-up modems hissing over analogue phone lines, CRT monitors driven by decaying phosphors, spinning hard drives and magnetic tape that relied on constant power, maintenance, and human presence. Those systems were never stable endpoints in any enduring sense; their signals vanished the moment they were received, their protocols were crude, and their physical substrates have long since degraded, been erased, or thrown away. Even if physics permitted a message to be sent backward in time, there is nothing left to receive it: no addressable infrastructure, no listening process still running inside that causal frame. The past is not merely unreachable because time forbids it; it is unreachable because its technology was built to disappear. 1990 is not a dormant node awaiting reconnection — it is a powered-down, dismantled world, beyond reach not just in theory, but in every practical, material sense. The past is not offline; it is gone.

Photographed for Victoria's Secret, Summer 1991.

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Bridget Hall, Elle Italia, February 1996. Photographed by Gilles Bensimon.

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Sapphire & Steel operates in a zone that contemporary aesthetic theory would describe as the eerie rather than the horrific. In Mark Fisher’s terms, the eerie emerges when there is an absence where there should be presence, or a presence where there should be absence. The show repeatedly constructs spaces that conform to this logic: domestic rooms stripped of human warmth, children’s rhymes rendered threatening by context, or time itself behaving like an unseen intruder. These formal strategies destabilise the viewer’s assumption that the world is coherent and continuous, generating an uncanny atmosphere through the slow realisation that something is fundamentally wrong.

A second theoretical lens is hauntology, where media forms bear the imprint of other eras and unrealised futures. The show’s production values — videotape texture, muted lighting, set-bound staging have aged into something that feels suspended between eras. Instead of diminishing the show, this temporal dislocation strengthens the aesthetic effect. One perceives a world that is both familiar and lost, as though watching a broadcast from a parallel timeline. Because the narrative concerns fractures in time, the medium itself becomes part of the message, with the artefacts of its era acting as aesthetic features that allow the past to bleed into the present.

Finally, the show’s treatment of character aligns with a tradition of metaphysical minimalism. Sapphire and Steel are deliberately under-explained, abstract, and emotionally restrained. They function almost as agents of negation, clearing away conventional narrative cues — emotion, exposition, psychological grounding — to expose the underlying strangeness of the world. This prevents the viewer from anchoring the experience in human drama and instead redirects attention to atmosphere, ontology, and the instability of time. The result is an aesthetic that feels unusually modern: sparse, disquieting, and concerned not with character arcs but with the integrity of reality itself.

Callaghan is a Spanish footwear brand founded in 1987 by Basilio García Pérez-Aradros under the Hergar Group, based in La Rioja. It emerged with a focus on comfort-driven, technologically oriented casual shoes and gained early recognition with its 1991 Náutico Over model, which helped define its identity in Spain.

Ready To Wear, Photographed for Spring & Summer 1991.

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I grew up with a world that still had:

• scarcity
• mystery
• slowness
• locality
• deep engagement
• real community
• real boredom
• real privacy
• analogue warmth
• anticipation
• physicality

And that world is gone forever.

There is a scientific idea I’ve often heard, one that is both beautiful and unsettling: the notion that if you travelled far enough away from the Earth, you could look back and see the world as it was in another year — perhaps even 1990. The idea rests on a simple truth: light takes time to travel. When I look at the Moon, I’m seeing it as it was a little over a second ago. When I look at the Sun, I’m seeing it eight minutes in the past. And when astronomers look at distant galaxies, they are witnessing events that happened millions or billions of years before any human existed. Looking across vast distances is, in a very real physical sense, the same as looking back in time.

By that logic, the light that left Earth in 1990 is still travelling outward into space, carrying with it the faint, scattered imprint of the world as it was then. In theory, if I journeyed tens or hundreds of light-years away and possessed a perfect telescope, I would intercept that old light and see Earth as it appeared in that year. The idea feels almost like a loophole in reality — a scientific whisper that the past still exists somewhere, still moving through the darkness, still intact in the form of ancient photons.

But here is the truth most people overlook: even though the physics is correct, I could never see Earth in any meaningful detail. The light escaping our planet is impossibly faint, dispersed, and chaotic. It does not assemble itself into images of streets, faces, shops, or skies. Even with a telescope far beyond anything humanity has ever imagined, Earth would remain nothing more than a dim, trembling point of light. The practical reality is that the world of 1990 is physically unreachable, no matter how far I travel or how much technology I possess. The idea is scientifically sound but forever beyond reach.

Yet the emotional power of the thought remains. There is something haunting in knowing that the light of 1990 is still out there, still travelling through the universe, still carrying some trace of the world I once inhabited. Even if I can never recover it — even if it can never be seen again — the knowledge that those photons departed Earth at that moment and continue their journey gives the past a strange and fragile persistence. It satisfies a deep human wish: that what mattered to us doesn’t simply vanish, but continues outward in some form, expanding into the dark.

Still, the unsettling truth persists beneath the poetry: even though the light of 1990 still exists somewhere, I can never step into that world again. I cannot re-enter its atmosphere, its sounds, its scents, its daily rhythms. The idea offers a certain comfort, but also a very sharp reminder about the nature of time. For human beings, time moves in only one direction. We cannot return. We can only remember — and even our memories are shadows compared to the worlds we once moved through so easily.

There are moments when I realise, with a kind of cold clarity, that entire worlds I once lived in have vanished. The world of 1990 — its atmosphere, its colours, its sounds, the way people moved and dressed and expected the future to unfold — no longer exists in any living form. And what unsettles me most is knowing that even if I had infinite wealth, every resource ever generated, I still couldn’t return to that world. Money can build cities and resurrect brands, but it cannot reconstruct a moment in time. That truth forces me to confront the one boundary I can never cross: time moves forward, and nothing I do can stop it.

When I acknowledge this, I feel how little control I have over the passage of years. I can shape my choices, my surroundings, my routines, but I cannot keep the world from changing, nor can I reopen the doors that have closed behind me. Understanding that the world of a particular year — especially one that shaped me — has disappeared completely is more than historical awareness. It is an encounter with my own mortality. The past doesn’t fade softly; it drops into an unreachable dimension, sealed off from the present no matter how vividly I remember it.

What makes this loss so sharp is that I didn’t merely observe that world — I lived inside it. I breathed its air without knowing how temporary it was. I walked streets and listened to music that felt utterly normal at the time, as if they would always be there. When I think back to 1990 now, I’m not just remembering a culture; I’m remembering myself. The person I was then — with that particular set of hopes, perceptions, and innocence — is just as unreachable as the era itself. Letting that sink in brings a kind of grief I didn’t expect to carry into adulthood.

The recent past feels especially cruel in this way. It’s close enough that I can recall it in detail — the fashion, the fragrances, the texture of daylight, the sound of particular voices — yet it remains impossibly far. A vanished world is not like a missing object; I can’t replace it or recover it. Its nearness makes the loss sharper, not softer. The past begins to feel almost autonomous, as if it exists independently of me, watching from a distance I cannot cross. I reach for it, but it has slipped into another realm where I cannot follow.

And yet, the fact that I feel this so strongly tells me something important about myself. I was present in my own life. I noticed things. I absorbed the world as it existed then, and it left an imprint that still lives in me. The emotional weight I feel now isn’t a flaw; it’s evidence that those years mattered. Even though I can never go back, my memory holds what time has taken, and that is its own kind of survival. The world of 1990 is gone forever, but the fact that I mourn it means I truly lived through it — and that, in its own way, is a form of meaning that time cannot erase.

I have been a devotee of Strangelove for quite some time. Their scents are majestic, enigmatic, and seem almost timeless. I suspect this is partly because, as far as I know, they have never been absorbed into a large conglomerate. Their work still carries the depth, craft, and integrity that defined the designer fragrances I discovered as a teenager nearly forty years ago.

Much of that quality has vanished as once-great houses were gradually swallowed by large corporations, and Strangelove stands out precisely because it has refused to follow that path. I own most of the Strangelove collection, but it’s only recently that I’ve started experimenting with layering. My most successful pairing so far has been Dead of Night oil with Fall Into Stars EDP.

This pairing works because each fragrance completes what the other lacks, creating a full architectural structure instead of two overlapping scents. Dead of Night, as an oil, forms a warm, stable foundation on the skin. Its resinous oud, sandalwood, and amber unfold slowly, staying close and intimate. The oil’s low volatility prevents sharp edges and anchors the scent with a sacred, resinous depth that feels devotional and steady.

Fall Into Stars brings the opposite qualities: lift, movement, and radiance. Its volatile aromatic notes rise above the oil rather than sinking into it, creating the effect of warm resin below and incense-like brightness above. Both fragrances use a refined, polished oud profile, so they stay aligned tonally without clashing. Their contrast creates real dimension: Dead of Night is dark and contemplative, while Fall Into Stars is luminous and atmospheric.

Together, the skin’s warmth expands the oil while the alcohol-based spray projects outward, pulling the two layers into a unified aura. There are no competing citrus or sharp top notes, so the blend feels seamless and intentional. The resulting structure naturally evokes a sacred atmosphere: depth, calm, rising incense, space, and quiet intensity. In essence, the oil builds the sacred foundation, the EDP builds the church-like lift, and their ouds harmonise into a coherent, atmospheric whole.