12
Nov
When you are a little kid, you don’t think much about what to wear or what fabric your bag or sweatshirt is made of – that’s what moms are for!
But as you grow older, you start reading the little note sewed in your clothes that says where something was made and what fabrics the garment is made of.
It’s important how you want to present yourself and what story you want to tell the people around you.
Star Trek is a franchise that has always celebrated humanity’s potential for tolerance and understanding.
In many ways, it’s succeeded in this ideal – The Original Series was groundbreaking for its portrayal of people from all walks of life coming together to explore the stars, and subsequent series have followed suit over the years.
Star Trek: Discovery heralds a new era for Star Trek costume design, updating the uniforms and completely rebooting the Klingon aesthetic.
Fabrics matter
The fabrics you wear tell a story about you; who you are, what you like and how you see yourself.
We believe that fashion is about feeling great with the looks we love and feeling great about who we are.So why not feel like a true Star Trekker all the time?
First seen with the arrival of Captain Pike (Anson Mount) and his crew in Brother back in January, the gold, red and blue Starfleet costumes marked the third reimagining of the ‘60s-era outfits in Trek production, after two versions of those tunics had been used in the Kelvin Timeline films over the past decade.
Therefore, the most daunting challenge for Star Trek: Discovery was reviving the classic Trek uniforms for the modern era.
The smart fabric that was used was from a Swiss fabric company called Schoeller. The fabric is a four-way stretch (material).
Smart fabrics can sense different environmental conditions and intelligent textiles (e-textiles) can not only sense environmental changes, but can automatically respond to their surroundings or stimuli, such as thermal, chemical or mechanical changes.
Schoeller Textiles specializes in fabrics that’s used mostly for rugged work outdoors and can wick moisture as well as “breathe” and repel water. It can even adjust to temperature changes.
Fun facts about the Discovery uniforms
Let’s have a quick look behind the scenes of the woman behind the making of the Star Trek uniforms and a small little hiccup that occurred during the final rounds of designing— they forgot to put the rank on the uniform.
That was thankfully saved by the marketing team.
Firstly, Gersha Phillips, the show’s busy costume designer was in charge of the costume department.
Gersha Phillips defines Star Trek as the originator of so many technological advances, and many interesting things in terms of keeping the banner going for racial and gender equality.
It’s the only series that depicts the future with this sort of optimistic view.
The costume department in Discovery’s production facility spreads across several rooms. One smallish, cramped-up room is a hodgepodge of costumes, patterns, design books and more. On the walls there are sketches of current and in-the-works costumes.
Secondly, the only thing that didn’t occur in the minds of the designers on time was, that the rank was previously done with pips on the badges. Therefore, when they first shot the first few days of Enterprise uniforms, they forgot to put the rank on.
The team spent a night trying to figure out how to add rank bars on their uniforms.
Then they had to go back and CGI (Computer-generated imagery) the stripes on the days when the team didn’t do it.
In a show filled with dazzling special effects, one of the places where you least expect to find CGI is around a Starfleet officer’s wrist, but if you ask someone aware of that blooper, the answer you’ll get is that it cannot be noticed because in the end it was done right.
Color coding for Star Trek: Discovery
It first started with colors. The team was trying to honor The Original Series.
It took several months to come up with the final colors, as the design department and producers contemplated assorted shades and brightness/darkness levels and conducted dye tests.
Star Trek has a long tradition of color-coded uniforms signifying the divisions in which Starfleet personnel serve.
Perhaps most memorably, in The Original Series, Command Division was gold, Science and Medical Divisions were blue, and Operations, Engineering and Security Divisions were red.
The color coding of the Starfleet uniforms on Star Trek: Discovery continues with the metallic badges in the gold, silver and bronze colors of respective divisions. What’s more, these badges display the division insignia as seen on The Original Series: the stylized star for Command, a “ringed planet” for Sciences and a spiral for Operations.
The yellow is called “Harvest Gold,” The blue is called “Denim Blue” and the red is called “Merlot Red”.
Which Starfleet member are you?
Now that you know why the Star Trek: Discovery uniforms have their particular colors, the final question you should ask yourself is: “Which Starfleet member do I want to be?”
Star Trek fans are legendary for making and/or purchasing costumes for cosplaying at events and conventions.
It all depends on how you choose to feel.
You don’t have to wear a costume to feel like a true fan. All you have to do is find the color that inspires you to be the best version of yourself.
If that means wearing blue one day to feel like you belong in the medical and science world, red the next day to feel like you are leading your daily operation, so be it!
“Sometimes a feeling is all we humans have to go on.” James T. Kirk, A Taste of Armageddon.
Living by this statement, ladies and gentlemen, is how you become a future star for command!
