With corsets, tweed and ray guns, steampunk pays tribute to a science fiction vision of the Victorian era through literature, fashion, design and graphic novels. Its a creative movement based on the prospective of how the Victorians imagined the future and its technologies to be, and where followers create spectacular inventions and costumes from found objects.

It’s in the Victorian science fiction stories of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne – the technology and imagined worlds that have inspired and shaped steampunk.

The world “steampunk” combines the DIY nature of punk with technology at the time of steam power and was coined by science fiction writer K.W. Jeter in 1987. Its an elegant, aristocratic fashion that harksback to the romanticism of another era – a sepia-toned, rust-brown world rather than the dark, macabre mourning clothes of the goth, as if the image has been caught by an old Victorian camera.