Broken Bow - Diane Carey [75]
Environment is also a consideration for the costumes on the series. Since the characters spend most of their time on the ship, the uniforms must contrast with those sets to some degree. While the overall design is an important consideration, Blackman does not allow it to entirely determine his concepts. “I look to see what the designs are, but the colors of the set don’t really influence me in this particular world,” he explains. “My notion is that if you have that much activity in the background then you need to make the thing in the foreground, which is usually the actor, as simple as possible. Hence, these sort of blue matte fabric uniforms. Yeah, they’ve got zippers and so on and so forth, but that does all blend eventually and you’re really just looking at the surface. There are a couple of scenes I saw being shot where they’re standing in front of a lot of moving graphics and you never lose them. You’re never distracted by the graphics. The graphics are brilliant, but they don’t talk.”
Though the Enterprise is an Earth ship with a crew made up almost entirely of humans, two alien characters have been added to the mix in the form of T’Pol, of Vulcan, and Dr. Phlox, of an alien race new to Star Trek. These characters represented two distinctly different challenges for Blackman. In T’Pol he has a character of a race the audience is quite familiar with. The task in this case was to maintain the familiar while reinventing the look more for today’s audience.
Blackman describes his approach to this new character: “Some of it is about broad-based marketing and other parts of it are about getting a character going. That uniform has a sort of form fit. It’s a very beautiful woman. But it has certain things that, over the years, I have distilled out of the original Vulcans. When I say the original Vulcans, I’m talking the return of Spock—the movies’ version rather than anything that happened in The Original Series. Those things are very much based on a kind of Chinese silhouette. They were very metallic and very brocadey and flat at the same time. ... Over the years, I developed a kind of eye that gave you an echo of that. It’s a serpentine thing that starts slightly extended from the shoulder point and then curves in and back out so you get the notion that you’re creating a very wide shoulder as some of those mandarin clothes do, but without actually doing it. So, that is the basis to her.
“The Vulcan civilization is also X amount of years earlier. She’s definitely in earth tones. It’s kind of a gray/brown, very sort of striated piece of fabric. The Vulcans tend to be more coolish in color. I’ve chosen not to do that. I’ve chosen to warm her up. She plays against it. She’s very Vulcan in the script and she’s very Vulcan—and will be, I think—throughout. There’s a hint of Vulcan in the design and it’s got to be a uniform. We’ve never seen the Vulcans in uniform before. So I just went with this other look.”
On the other hand, there is Dr. Phlox, a character from a distinctly new race of what the script refers to only as “an exotic alien species.” As there was no Star Trek history to look to for his specific character, Blackman started with a basis in familiar Earth design and evolved from there. He describes the look as similar to shirts of East Indian design that tend to be longer and hang down over the pants. Blackman goes on, “I’ve taken that design—using that as a kind of gentle shape—to pull him away from the rest of the people. These sort of shirt/smock things. And then just added a few odd details to them