In pop culture, the space-age style is soaring in the homes of celebrities, the global design fairs even in blockbuster movies. We reviewed the amazing retro intuition origins of the biggest interior aesthetics of 2025, and asked, why now?

From aerodynamic cars to sprawling lunar seats, pop culture and design are all in the universe. Some architects, designers, filmmakers and galleries are looking for, if not Star Wars’ “far galaxy”, at least, to transcend the Earth’s atmosphere.

Marvel Studios' latest movie Fantastic Four: Step One, will be released in July, with a living room with rounded recessed sofa set and glossy white round side table, and a car with oversized fins. Not your typical style for action adventure blockbusters.

In the real world, some major American interior designers make the space-age aesthetic highly stylish. LA- and Milan's Giampiero Tagliaferri are one of the designers who provide the "California Space Age" aesthetics for Tech Moguls, Art Collectors, Fashion Greates and Pop Stars. Such a shiny white futuristic spiral staircase is not out of place in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film A Space Odyssey.

American interior designer Kelly Wearstler's own Malibu Beach House is full of space-age designs, such as the 1970s sofa and Chaise Longue of Afra and Tobia Scarpa, and the 1957 Digamma chairs, under the four-legged feet of Ignazio Gardella.

Meanwhile, furniture brands such as Pauling, Pauling, Pauling, etc. quickly discovered the trend, or perhaps leading it. From the early 1970s, the Space Age design was reissued by influential French furniture designer Pierre Paulin. In particular, his dune ensemble modular seating arrangement and its echoes on the surface of the planet have become a favorite among music industry genres and influencers. Famous private singer Frank Ocean, Red Pepper Bassist Flea, Rapper Travis Scott, Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian all reportedly.

Gallery and design fairs are taking this retro nostalgia as nostalgia. The Rhine on display at the Vitra Design Museum in Will, Germany is a science fiction design: from the space age to the convergence. It explores how space-age designers provide film directors with the ideal furniture for sci-fi movies: Olivier Mourgue’s 1960s Djinn seat series in 2001: Odyssey of Space Odyssey; Eero Aarnio’s 1971 Tomato Chair by Eero Aarnio at Black Men in Black (1997) in Barry Sonnenfeld; and Paulin’s 1966 Ribbon Chair by Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017).

The hottest tickets for this spring's Milan Design Week are the installation created by fashion house Loro Piana and delightful furniture designer Dimorestudio. In La Prima notte di letime, they showcase an ideal 1970s apartment, purely the Italo-Californian Space-Age era fashion fashion: sunken dialogue pits, round beds, cascades of Cuboid wall lights, retro seating, restorative walls, electric green carpets.

The vast Brafa Art Fair in Brussels also exhibits the space-age shapes. Each year, Delen Private Bank, with extraordinary modernist art and mid-century furniture, created a room at the fair as the ultimate apartment. This time, its most striking room is the pure space era—a red glossy wall condones Verner Panton’s Visiona exhibition, most of which are symbolic eras: Joe Colombo Elda chairs.

Of course, the root of this aesthetic was in the first space race, when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and continued through NASA's Apollo program throughout the 1960s. These events have dominated the global media, and people around the world no longer accept the idea that human beings have entered a new era. "It seems natural objects and spaces should reflect this," Peter Martin, author of Space Age Design: The Movement's icons, told the BBC.

Against this backdrop, pre-war design and architecture suddenly looked outdated. Instead, the cool height is the forward-looking sophistication of Eero Aarnio’s 1963 Pallo or Ball Caine, ideally placed in a modernist home.

Moreover, it is not only inclined to such space-aged furniture. As cars get bigger and bigger, airports start to be like spacecraft, such as the TWA flight center in Eero Saarinen, New York.

This trend accelerated with the moon landing in the late 1960s and was reflected in TV and cinemas. And 2001: Space Odyssey, and the iconic TV series Star Trek. In the music, there is the Telstar single with the tornado, and in fashion, some designers reveal a futuristic look, including Paco Rabanne’s iconic 1968 Gold-Chain Space Age Goale gown.

There is also a practical reason that makes space-age design popular. It arrived with the advent of new materials developed during the war years, and by the mid-1950s they entered workshops and studios for a new generation of designers.

For a time, plastic became synonymous with space-age designers now. As Cristina Bargna, head of the plastic design collection of the Brussels Design Museum, said in Martin's book: "In the 1950s, plastic represented possibility, freedom and joy. Freedom of shape; creating new furniture that provides the possibility of a new house - materials that a new generation desires to speak in different ways, plastic no longer able to realize the material, thus creating a new material that becomes a reality.

Another factor is mass production, which exploded for ammunition explosions in the war years, and then turned to an emerging consumer culture. Smart designers form alliances with manufacturers. “The story of space-age design is in many ways a story of a partnership between designers and manufacturers. Joe Colombo and Cartel; Karlinen and Knoll; verner panton with vitra; peter ghyczy with elastogran and elastogran, ''

The peak of space-age design is directly after the moon landing. "Now we know that the beginning of things is actually the end of fact-we will soon leave the moon without returning, but in the joy of the moon landing, things don't look much different."

At this point, space is the hottest topic, with mainstream global interest in injecting a large amount of energy into the design and influence of the space age. It can be seen everywhere from David Bowie's Space Oddity (released a month after landing) to JVC's space-fixed video world TV.

In assuming we will live in space for decades, the designers have considered the possible appearance.

Sofa design is a classic example. "Modular sofas have been around since the 1940s, but now they have become huge and heroic, creating a fabulous futuristic lifestyle," Martin said. "The rigid forms come out; the wrapping, sensual, organic shapes all come in." These are declaration sofas that can belong to the Villas in Lake Como or the space station orbiting the moon. Sitting upright; the sofa is for sleeping, socializing or partying.

In this era, there were two giants that could provide the design movement in the space age: the iconic 1973 Togo designed by Michel Ducaroy for Ligne Roset. and Mario Bellini's 1972 Camaleonda, written for B&B Italia. Both are still in production and are highly sought after.

Now the aesthetics are back. Rediscovery, nostalgia and a new sense of competition both help revive the design of the space-age era.

The nostalgia of the space race itself began in 2022, when Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 jacket sold for $2.8 million (£2.3 million) at Sotheby’s in New York. Since then, space souvenirs have become a huge market. Last year, Tom Hanks’ immersive display of the Moon Walker (Reconstructing the Apollo Mission) was the main attraction in London’s Lightroom.

"This is largely because of what that era represents - the pioneering sensitivity of Western countries to take root in the sense of mission for the future," Martin said.

What aroused this interest in the first space age was that we are now at the forefront of the second wave. NASA's Artemis program is about to return to the moon, with humans planning to land for the first time in 2027 since the 1970s. This time, the competition is international, Chinese, Indian and American private companies compete for the top spot in space.

This is reflected in vibrant designs in several regions, such as Chinese-born Peng Zheng (now a senior product designer at Zoom, California) and Eason Zhu (Hangzhou multidisciplinary design studio Fununit Design, etc.).

Designers like this are “building a vision of a new way of life that is completely immune to what has happened before,” Martin said.