Galactic Style Guide – Color I

Welcome to the first entry in our ‘Galactic Style Guide counterpoint’ subseries! Where the GSG could be summed up as ‘how to look Star Warsy’, these alternate posts are meant to highlight and remedy common mistakes that can make an outfit look Not Star Warsy!
From the very beginning, the world of Star Wars has always had a very specific visual style. Unlike the matinee serials it was inspired by (in which heroes wore shiny, silver bodysuits and enemies wore bright gold and scarlet robes), the Galaxy Far Far Away was much more grounded in its visuals. While characters might fly starships across the galaxy and duel with swords made of pure energy, they didn’t dress futuristic. Chief costume designer John Mollo’s mix-and-matching of real world historical styles (Russian/Japanese peasantry, American cowboys, medieval gowns, World Wars military uniforms, etc) for inspiration provided the solid and believable foundation from which the series’ visuals would evolve. As part of this grounded approach, most characters tend to wear costumes in a very specific range of colors:

“The color scheme basically was the baddies would be black or gray, with the exception of the stormtroopers, and the goodies should be in earth colors—fawns and whites… Mollo tried to keep the colors muted wherever possible. Color is very, very difficult to use. Bright colors don’t work well on film, particularly reds and blues. George always goes for the authentic….and if it’s all garish color, it doesn’t work.” (Brandon Alinger. Star Wars Costumes – the Original Trilogy, 2014. p 15.)

This rule does not mean, however, that your outer persona need be limited to earth tones and shades of gray – as we saw a few weeks ago, there are tons of examples of characters wearing every color of the rainbow (especially in the pre-Imperial period)! However, if you noticed, almost all of them had something in common. As we read above, the main rule for creating authentic in-universe clothing is simple: Avoid. Garish. Color.: thus, if a garment is a fully-saturated hue, it is much less likely to ‘read’ as being authentic to the Star Wars setting. Let’s take a look at what I mean.

I’ve actually seen three cosplayers of ‘Commander Doom’ come across my feed over the last few months; since I only watched the ‘lost’ sixth season of The Clone Wars once, I didn’t remember the character or his design…but I was pretty sure his armor wasn’t the vibrant bluish, ‘John Deere’, or somewhere-in-between green that various costumers have painted their Doom kits:

Boldly-colored garments aren’t exclusive to fan creations, however…
If you’ve followed this blog for very long, you’ll know I try to turn a blind eye to most post-buyout Star Wars material. So when a pictures came across my feed of someone wearing an eye-popping green leather jacket at Galaxy’s Edge, announcing it was a replica of a jacket worn by a character from ‘Resistance’ (which is post-Disney, Sequel-adjacent, and anime, thus well outside my wheelhouse), I had to look it up. “I know the modern designers have been slipping in divergent elements to the authentic SW look,” I told myself, “but there’s NO WAY they would put a character in a lime green jacket! …would they?”

Thankfully, the answer is no, they would not. While his jacket is a little busier design-wise than we would normally see in the days of the EU (more on that in a few months!), “Kazuda Xiono” does not, in fact, wear a lime green leather jacket; this is more a case of the folks producing the replica jacket being lazy and/or having low standards when it comes to reproducing an onscreen garment. While I can’t change the design, with a little digital trickery I was able to mockup what that jacket might look like in more Star Wars-appropriate colors:

Another unfortunate choice from recent media is the lemon yellow shirt worn by ‘Lando’ in ‘SOLOastarwarsstory’ (I had to be reminded of this piece because I’ve managed to mostly-successfully forget about that hot mess of a flick). Lando’s shirt is perhaps the most egregious example of a garish color worn by a main character who’s not piloting a snubfighter.

As if the yellow shirt wasn’t bad on its own, they also give him a bright blue cape lining and a red belt-sash…he’s literally wearing full-saturation primary colors. Used well, bright colors can be great accents, but they should not be front-and-center. While I understand the idea was to try and present Lando as a hip, slick, stylish, fashion-forward card shark, the entire ensemble would have the opposite effect in-universe, as one of the classic EU’s crown jewels includes a memorable scene which proves our point perfectly.

^{“Wedge, Face, and Donos, informally the Yokel Group, found lodgings at the Revos Liberty, a hostel catering to large ships’ crews on shore leave. … Face excused himself for a few minutes and returned with a pile of brightly colored cloth. He handed out individual portions to the others.
Wedge shook his out. A short-sleeved tunic in orange and yellow tropical fruit patterns and short pants in lavender. “I’m going to throw up.”Face smiled. “That would be the final bit of trim on the ensemble, wouldn’t it? I recommend you keep the hat. That really completes the image of an Agamaran stereotype with no taste and no sense.”
Donos looked mournfully at his outfit: a shirt with thin red and green horizontal stripes and shorts with black and white vertical stripes. “Sir, permission to kill Face?”
“Granted. But keep your hat, like Face says.”
Face unfolded his own fashion disaster. A black silken shirt with a variety of insects picked out on it in glittery silver, shorts in a brighter, more painful orange than that of New Republic pilot’s suits, and a red kerchief for his neck. “As you can see, I saved the best for myself.”}

X-wing: Wraith Squadron

This passage, more than any other, shows that brightly colored and patterned clothing DOES exist in the GFFA, but it is considered to be the height of tackiness!
Bottom line: bold colors (especially if they’re unweathered) will make an outfit look not like an authentic Star Wars character, but more like an action figure (Power Rangers or Jurassic Park Chaos Effect) come to mind. In a couple months, we’ll practice using a powerful tool for visualizing and practicing our ‘Star Wars eye’. Join us then!

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