Latex Space Suit

Yes, people are actually working on these.

"That's what turns a Mediocre Voyage into a Fantastic Voyage!"
—Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

Any space suit or environment suit, but especially one worn by a woman, will be exceptionally tight, form fitting, and flatteringly cut. Also applies to pilot's g-suits (which admittedly are tight, but not flattering), Powered Armor, and futuristic military uniforms. The wearer will have no difficulty putting it on quickly. Helmets will often be either clear bubbles or be motorcycle-like helmets that follow head movement, with large transparent and nonreflective faceplates.

Spacesuits in use today are bulky and inflexible, with many layers to contain pressure, protect against puncture from fast moving space junk with ballistic fibers, protect against changes in temperature, shield the wearer from the glare of a sun undimmed by atmosphere, and dispose of excess body heat, excretions and moisture. Astronauts accessorize with the extremely unsexy (for most), yet practical, adult diaper.

Because existing spacesuit designs have so many drawbacks, and are so expensive (each custom-fitted suit costs over a million dollars and can only be constructed by subsidised industries), there are a number of (similarly subsidised) research projects trying to make skin-tight spacesuits Truth in Television. The proponents of such projects as the Space Activity Suit and MIT Biosuit claim that they could be built by wet-suit manufacturers at a cost of only a few hundred dollars. They also suggest that these flexible skintight suits would permit the occupant to regulate body temperature simply by sweating, and that while they might not be terribly protective, armor is less of an issue when it doesn't have to be pressurized - Bullet Proof Vests can be worn over the suits. So far however, practical spacesuits based on Space Activity Suit/Biosuit technology have yet to be tested in the space,^[1] so currently they remain Vapor Wear-- erm, sorry, Vaporware.

The Latex Spacesuit is essentially a way to be semi-Stripperific, and display the chest without actually showing skin. A lot of the time it will be sheer enough to see the navel through.

See also Space Clothes, Green-Skinned Space Babe, Bridge Bunnies, Spy Catsuit, Chrome Champion. Compare its 19th century counterpart, the Adventurer Outfit.

Examples of Latex Space Suit include:

Straight Examples

Anime and Manga

Star Blazers (or, if one prefers, Space Battleship Yamato) from 1972 is one of the earliest appearances in anime of this trope. Nurse Yuki Mori, the only recurring female character, provides continuous Fan Service and is very fetching indeed in a yellow space suit that leaves so little to the imagination that it's hard to imagine it providing any protection against a stiff breeze, much less the vacuum of space.
Another of the earliest Anime examples are Mazinger Z and Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, also from 1972.
Neon Genesis Evangelion has the sexy pilot suits variant. It is notably subverted in the episode "Magmadiver", where Asuka has to wear a special plugsuit that swells like a balloon. Lampshaded, too, as she complains about how unsexy it is.
- Played with a bit early in the series, when, in an emergency, Shinji has to wear the female variant of the suit. While male variants are also more or less skin-tight, the female version is tighter in the crotch and has vague sculpted breast elements and a curvier hip/waist ratio.
- Rebuild of Evangelion has Asuka donning a special plugsuit that has a translucent torso. Even Asuka finds it a bit much.
It is a very frequent trope in Super Robot Genre and Real Robot Genre mecha shows. One of the earliest examples -but not the first one, for one change- unsurprisingly was Mazinger Z: Kouji began to wear a Latex Space Suit in the third episode, and Sayaka always wore one while piloted Aphrodite A. Sayaka's was one-piece and tighter than Kouji's though. More mecha examples are:
- Great Mazinger: Tetsuya and Jun (again, the female character's suit was tighter)
- UFO Robo Grendizer: Duke, Kouji, Hikaru and Maria. Duke's suit was a completely literal example, since he wore it to travel across space in his spaceship/HumongousMecha.
- Getter Robo: Ryoma, Hayato and Michiru wore one. Musashi and Benkei's uniforms were subversions. It was reinforced in later manga seasons: if a pilot does not wear a protective uniform, his or her body can get seriously harmed due to the enormous strain the body suffers.
- Kotetsu Jeeg: Miwa always wore a tight Latex Space Suit when she piloted her suppor unit. However Hiroshi never wore a suit, since he transformed into the Humongous Mecha.
- Gaiking: Sanshiro Tsuwabuki and his crew.
- Raideen: Akira Hibiki.
- Combattler V: Hyoma and his Five-Man Band wore Color-Coded for Your Convenience space suits.
- Voltes V: Ditto with Kenighi and his Five-Man Band.
- Zambot 3: Kappei and his two cousins.
- Daitarn 3: Banjo Haran when he was not wearing a James Bond suit.
- Daimos: Kazuya Ryuuzaki.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: ALL Gundam series since the first one. However, Amuro, Camille, Juudau... suits were less ornate and more practic than the ones Super Robot Genre pilots wore, and female suits were not tightier and sexier than the male ones.
- GoLion: Akira and his Five-Man Band.
- Gunbuster: Noriko and her friends' costumes are especifically designed to space combat.
The anime Stellvia of the Universe outfits the cadets at the Space Academy with tight-fitting flightsuits. Two of the protagonists (one male, one female) are notably shy about the cut of their uniforms; they come down to the flight deck with towels wrapped around them.
Rocket Girls, which ranks surprisingly highly on the Mohs Scale of Sci Fi Hardness, features skintight spacesuits are one of the technical advances developed by the Solomon Space Agency as part of its attempt to realize economical manned spaceflight, since such suits weigh much less then traditional spacesuits, and offer greater mobility. That being said, the show also plays the trope for laughs (several characters seem to find the suits rather scandalous) and fan service too.
- One of the reporters present at a press conference sees it and asks, rather nervously, "Is it legal to show this?"
- Both novels lampshade this a couple of times by having characters mention that the spacesuits look "just like the ones in anime".
Martian Successor Nadesico had these in spades. On pilots, on cosplayers, on cosplaying pilots...and like some parts of Mobile Suit Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion, they're equal-opportunity Fan Service.
Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor gives a new twist to this trope. The suits that the pilots wear are remarkably tight and serve to avoid some of the pain that linking with the Fafner units entails. Another twist is the fact that upon linking the suits are ripped in some parts as the connection takes place, a process that is quite painful. Kazuki ha no time to put on a suit upon piloting for the time and the pain he undergoes is substantial.
Infinite Stratos: the so called Powered Armor of the series is better described as this trope plus some machinery covering the lower half of limbs and maybe some more machinery floating around them unattached to the suit. The Hand Wave is they have Some Kind of Force Field protecting them, all powered by Cold Fusion. It takes place in 2016 ...yeah.
Cowboy Bebop keeps the large helmet, but does features the iconic skin-tight suit.
- Except for the time that Spike went EVA with nothing but a pair of earplugs.
Sky Girls. It really doesn't help that four of the pilots are under the age of 18.
This was the uniform of most of the Numbers Cyborgs in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, with the exception being Uno. Otto had a coat and baggy pants over hers, making a lot of people mistake her for a male.
The SMS pilots in Macross Frontier wear form-fitting suits that are little more than longjohns with bulky shoulderpads, and a helmet. Although these are designed to interface with the exoskeleton control units in the cockpit, it's extremely jarring when they're forced to eject and float around in space during a nuclear exchange.
- It shows an evolution of spacesuits seen in previous installments. Zero (1999) -- normal modern piloting g-suits. SDF (2009) -- not exactly bulky, but still somewhat baggy suits. Plus (2040) -- leaner and slimmer version of the previous version. 7 (2045) -- essentially, the same as in Plus. Frontier (2059) -- glorified bodygloves. They are quite consistent there.
Code Geass: Suzaku's battle suit when piloting the Lancelot is a male example. The Black Knights' ace pilots end up receiving similar suits, whose creator insists they improve survival rates; in the second season, the Knights of the Round all wear designs similar to Suzaku's except personalized, making this trope apply to both men and women.
- Whenever one of the Black Knights eject from their Knightmares, their "flight suits" can be seen inflating around their torso like a wearable airbag. Therefore they do improve survival rates, while also providing Fanservice in their normal skin-tight mode.
  - Unless, of course, you happen to be a certain member of the Four Holy Swords.
This is the default outfit of MM in Kemeko Deluxe.
In Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo, not only are the spacesuits skintight, they are also mostly transparent.
- Justified, as none of the main characters are entirely human, can take a lot more punishment than a mere lack of pressure, and some don't really need to breathe anyway. If you're a QT-X, clothing is merely a fashion statement.
- Also, technology has advanced far enough that such outfits are viable protection against vacuum.
Misha/Mika and Kicker both wear these in Transformers: Energon. Misha's helmet even has a massive gap in the back to let her hair fall through.
Stratos 4. One of the pilot teams is the main four characters, who are all 16-year-old girls. Oh, and the commander (who looks like an Expy of Misato) also gets to fly some missions too.
- The guys (Sora and Tsubasa) get to wear these too. Possibly parodied once when they pretend to be the girls, complete with fake breast lumps.
The Guild in Last Exile is quite fond of this; examples are most apparent on Dio and Luciola.
- The Silvana Vanship squadron pilots also wear skin-tight bodysuits that leave extremely little, if anything, to the imagination. Range Murata likes his derriere-hugging overalls.
Trigun sees your form-fitting suits and adds strange tube-like constructions that look like ventilation systems.
Skintight suits are the standard uniform of choice for the girls in Fight Ippatsu! Juuden-chan!!. Well, half of the standard uniform. The other half is a stylized Office Lady outfit.
Both Chao and Chachamaru (despite Chacha being a Robot Girl) from Mahou Sensei Negima have a version of these.
Ryoko from Tenchi Muyo! has one. Helps that she can survive in a vaccum regardless.
DearS, naturally has them.
Meia from Vandread has this as her main outfit.
- Justified since it's more of a flightsuit and not something she's expected to go into hard vacuum in. In the first episode, Dita wears a bulky suit for hazardous environments.
Not space suits, but Chirality has the main cast wearing form-fitting suits.
Bubblegum Crisis has the pilot suit variant and even shows that the Kight Sabers are completely nude underneath with Priss briefly seen topless while putting hers on.

Comic Books

Valerian. The skintight suits can be worn almost everywhere including outer space and Scottish pubs. Nobody pays any attention. Though Laureline will switch, often "on screen", to freshly shopped local garb, and will manage this even in the middle of a desert on a forsaken wartorn planet, while Valerian like as not will stick with his suit.
DC's Legion of Super-Heroes takes things a step further with the transuit, a skin-tight and completely transparent environment suit which enables characters to breathe in a vacuum or otherwise hostile environment without being perceptible as anything more than a white armband (despite being full-body and skin-tight, the transuits do not so much as flatten down the characters' hair). Unlike most Latex Space Suits, the transuit's skin-tightness is not a means of providing fanservice, since it is transparent and worn over normal clothing... but since most Legionnaires both male and female wear skin-tight superhero jumpsuits anyhow, it all comes out the same.
From The Authority, The Engineer's skintight nanosuit, which doesn't look like clothes so much as making her look like a naked silver fembot (semi-justified due to her being a closet exhibitionist) can double (triple?) as body armor and a spacesuit in a pinch.
In Empowered, Mind**** wears one when she isn't in a hard vacuum. However she's forced to go out in space wearing her Latex Space Suit since the D10 was badly damaged and didn't have time to put the heavy suit on.
- Emp's tattered bikini's worth of supersuit also qualifies.
The Vinean space suits in Yoko Tsuno qualify, giving the main character ample opportunity to show off her curves.
Hazmat from Avengers Academy wears a skin-tight environmental suit to protect everyone else from her toxicity. That said, her figure is relatively understated.
- Her future self, however..

Film

The spacesuits in Silent Running are like this. Well, the one that we see, at any rate.
The cryosuits in Lost in Space are like this, which is to be expected, given its source material's costume choices. Here they are less thin latex and more moulded, tight plastic. Not much emphasis is placed on them and they only worn during the first act. After that the crew wears more normal clothing. This might be due to how inevitably revealing they were on the three female characters.
In Santo En El Tesoro De Dracula, heroine Luisa wears a shiny silver version when she is sent back to 19th century Mexico by El Santo's time machine.

Literature

In Ivan Efremov's Hour of the Bull, Earth astronauts use skin-tight spacesuits, which however feature a panty-shaped "waste destructor" (basically, a diaper with unlimited capacity), which allows to wear those suits for weeks.
- Sergei Pavlov's Moon Rainbow series feature in later installments the "spacesuit" that is literally secreted from the body, turning the wearer into a Chrome Champion. It's actually a layer of a symbiotic living Nanomachines that could be psychically controlled by their host.
Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy includes space-suits that are made of programmable silicon or somesuch- they hang around as a black blob until activated, at which point they spread over the body of the user (tightly enough to avoid decompression in hard vacuum).
In Larry Niven's Known Space stories, the state of the art is "skinsuits" similar to the real-life SAS described above. The suits must be specially constructed to fit each individual, and are usually painted with distinctive personal designs. Anyone wearing a bulky and generic "bubble suit" marks himself as a newbie (or an Earthling) and is not to be trusted on his own in vacuum.
In Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy, the early colonists of Mars use "mesh" suits; this has the advantage of being very lightweight and flexible, but unfortunately does nothing to protect its user from the extreme cold. Thus the colonists often have to wear mundane cold-weather clothing over their pressure suits. They also must wear helmets with an independent air supply.
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Lady Sandra Bright "Sally" Fowler is specifically noted to be wearing a suit like this during her zero gravity training.
In Dan Simmons' Illium/Olympos books, the Old-style humans use Thermskins to protect them from all manner of hostile environments, space, extreme cold, low oxygen environments, underwater, etc. It's explained that the thermskins are a single molecule thin paint-like substance which is only functional if in direct contact with the skin. This creates a justified extreme of this trope, as all anatomical details are perfectly visible.
Jason Stoddard's short story "Winning Mars" lampshades the fetishistic overtones of this trope. TV executives involved with a reality-TV mission to Mars fund the creation of practical Space Activity Suits, referred to as "squeezesuits", for openly Fan Service-based reasons.
In Greg Bear's Moving Mars, some rebellious college students decide to go outside in the near-vacuum using "skin seal" (which isn't supposed to be used except in emergencies). It's sprayed onto the body, and requires its user to be naked.
One bit of pre-melding plague tech in Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space universe is a membrane of nanomachines stretched over a hole in a spacecraft's hull. Replacing both airlock and spacesuit, all you have to do is pass through the membrane and it wraps you in a spacesuit, and removes it on your way back in.
A mesh spacesuits are used by the specialist SAS team in The Atrocity Archives, the first novel of The Laundry Series by Charles Stross. The point is made that the suit compresses you by its own elasticity, which generally ensures that any gas in your body outside of your lungs is squeezed out of the nearest orifice.
In Robert Heinlein's Have Spacesuit - Will Travel human spacesuits are typically bulky and high maintenance. However, it is revealed that aliens have developed sufficient technology that what amounts to a latex spacesuit is possible. When the lead character sees a young girl wearing one, he is understandably surprised it actually functions better than his own.
John Varley's stories take this to its (il)logical conclusion, admittedly with form-fitting force fields rather than physical spacesuits. Worn over the nude body, the force fields will protect their wearers from virtually any hostile environment, are one molecule thick, and perfectly reflective, making their wearers look like chrome robots or animated statues. (Oh, and when they come into contact the fields will merge, allowing their wearers to have sex in them.)
In John Ringo's East of the Sun, and West of the Moon, these suits are Justified as being necessary for proper heat exchange, not to mention the importance of leaving no space for trapped air to inflate the suit in the low atmospheric pressures of space, rendering the suit too stiff to move. In this case, the suits are so skin tight that the wearers have to prepare themselves with a depilatory cream to remove all of the hair from their bodies, with the suits being made with molds made of the wearers' bodies.

Live Action TV

Lost in Space, especially Marta Kristen as Judy Robinson.
Power Rangers and Super Sentai has this by default, inevitably. This makes any gender changes for the American show weird at best, especially in the first few seasons where Yellow was male in Sentai, but female in Power Rangers.

Video Games

The various combat suits in Mass Effect, also known as harduits, are relatively form-fitting but can function in a vacuum. That being said, they do not provide significant protection against extreme temperatures, extreme pressure, or highly corrosive environments, unless you use models specifically designed for that purpose. Otherwise, the suits actually do look functional and realistic, being covered in playes of ceramic armor, compared with other examples of Latex Space Suits.
- Quar ians live nearly their entire lives inside latex space suits because of their atypical immune systems had atrophied due to the extended period aboard sterile environment spaceships due to their exile. Interestingly, they play this trope straight:

Ken: The whole suit is lovely; snug in all the right places...

- The balistic properties of space suits in Mass Effect are down-played due to relativistic speeds of projectiles. Since personal scale mass effect fields are used to slow/stop projectiles, the light armour suits they wear can focus more on environmental protection rather than being combat capable. Heavier armour features less Latex Space Suit and more Awesome Yet Practical with bulky (yet fitted) armour plating.
Ken Marinaris in Zone of the Enders: the 2nd Runner wears this.
All the playable characters in Air Rivals, as seen here. The Fan Service isn't very surprising, considering that this is an MMORPG after all.
Metal Gear Solid 2 has the Skull Suit. Despite the fact that it feels like you're wearing nothing at all, and the fact that Raiden only wears the helmet for five minutes of dialogue at the beginning of the game, it manages to enhance his muscles, provide a small amount of environmental protection and applies varing levels of pressure to internal organs in order to increase combat efficiency.
One of Ulala's many costumes in Space Channel 5 is her bright orange latex space suit, complete with bubble helmet, flared pants, and platforms.
Ratchet usually wears some variation of a skintight suit. Only addition required to venture out into vacuum of space is a breathing mask.
Destroy All Humans! 2: since the final location is on the moon, Natalya naturally sports one.

Webcomics

In Gunnerkrigg Court, the look of the "haptic feedback suits"—and their use in conjunction with a Hard Light-simulated space battle - is most likely a reference to this trope. The suits don't even have helmets: apparently creating a realistic simulation was the last thing on Dr. Disaster's mind.
Worn (by men) in Starfighter. Unsurprising, what with it being a Yaoi comic.
Last Res0rt has suits that are (relatively weak) Powered Armor uniforms, providing equal opportunity Fan Service for all.
The suits from Spacetrawler are tight enough that Emily is able to wear her Badass Longcoat over it.
In Schlock Mercenary uniforms acting as low-profile armor with deployable helmet are common, often also acting as low profile flight-capable Powered Armor. Karl Tagon once snidely called these "carbonan crotch-huggers".

Western Animation

Once Upon a Time... Life. Technically these are not space suits but look close enough.
The quote at the top is from an episode of The Simpsons parodying Fantastic Voyage: Homer, Bart and Lisa wear relatively normal red jumpsuits with helmets, whereas Marge wears a legless, chest-baring red jumpsuit...with a helmet.
- "White blood cells are eating my suit, but I have to admit they know where to stop."
The g-suits worn by the Angels in the 2005 CGI remake of Captain Scarlet embody this trope, being skin-tight and shiny!
Deliberately used by the makers of the Buzz Lightyear of Star Command cartoon, especially with the token Squadette, whose space suit is much more form-fitting than the others. Her long hair is kept under a hood similar to Buzz's own.

Real Life

The Space Activity Suit and MIT Biosuit, as mentioned above. The idea is that you don't need a pressurised spacesuit, or even an airtight one if you can just use form fitting fabric to hold the body together against its own pressure. You don't even need heating because vacuum isolates very well. The only thing is that it needs to be form fitting all over, even in tricky areas, otherwise you will inflate to match the form of the suit. And naturally there is a female professor working on them.

Subversions and Exceptions