Broken Bow - Diane Carey [74]
Costume designer Robert Blackman started working on Star Trek in the third season of The Next Generation, and was asked back for the latest installment, ready for his own challenge of reinventing the franchise. To do so, he looked at the series as a whole, focusing first on the evolution of the Starfleet uniform.
“We talked about the Star Trek timeline and where [the series] fit,” says Blackman. “We’ve got original Star Trek, we’ve got the movies, we’ve got The Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager. They all travel in a linear direction. We know where we started, originally, with classic Star Trek, and we know where we ended, at this point, which is DS9. Where those changes for the garments happened were pretty clear. It was then taking that knowledge of how it progressed and working backwards.”
The first question naturally became just how far to back up. Blackman’s challenge was to determine where the uniform design would have been one hundred years before The Original Series. To do this he chose an approach quite like Zimmerman’s approach to the designs for sets and props. Blackman looked to current apparel as his basis for extrapolating a look for the future. “What I chose to do was to back up to now and to do a lot of investigation on, essentially, supersonic jet pilot testing suits, NASA suits, that sort of look, and then play around with those and kind of move forward on them.”
Blackman likens his work to the evolution of clothing in general. “It’s sort of like the tie, which has been around for a hundred and thirty years and I don’t think that people are going to necessarily be tie-less in the next hundred and thirty years. There are aspects that are very familiar to us today that are recognizable aspects. I keep pressing those to really land it closer. We’re all well versed in what we imagine life in the universe will be in four or five hundred years, but what it’s going to be in a hundred years is another thing. So, my gut response to that is to tie it more to now than to then.”
In the case of Star Trek, the Starfleet uniforms have become integral to the look of the series. Blackman explains that the new look is a radical departure from the past. “All of the Starfleet stuff is natural fibers. For the first time ever, there are zippers and pockets. We’ve never had them. From The Original Series on, they were eliminated. Pockets, because the idea was there was no currency. There was nothing. You didn’t need house keys. It was all done electronically. No zippers or buttons because the clothes were imagined to be put on in some sort of way, by forcefield, or whatever the hell you wanted it to be.” In fact, the uniforms have taken on a more casual look beyond the addition of pockets and zippers with accessories of utility caps and away jackets.
“They wear black mock turtlenecks underneath,” Blackman continues. “The uniforms are a darkish blue, brushed twill that is stonewashed. So they look a little bit worn. There is a whole kind of casualness to it. They’re wrinkly. They’re just something that is not as formalized as we have done previously. They still are sort of formfit and sleek in the body. All of our people look heroic in them, which is always the goal. So there’s always those kinds of things that remain constant.”
Among the familiar, however, is the designation of department insignias. “One of the things that we’re resonating from the future are the color bars,” Blackman adds. “The colors are the same, but they had switched after