June 2022 – Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy

Galactic Style Guide – Color II

Welcome to another installment of our ‘Galactic Style Guide counterpoint’ subseries, where we help you strengthen your ‘Star Wars eye’ by highlighting and remedying common mistakes that can make an outfit look Not Star Warsy. As part of the Galactic Style Guide, the ultimate goal is still to help you create a more accurate ‘outer persona’ – but we approach the goal from the opposite direction!
As I teased last time, we’re going to be working with at an excellent tool for helping us see the ‘Star Wars look’ in action: Mando Creator . This handy bit of coding lets users create their own two-dimensional Mandalorian outfit by customizing every element in terms of design, color, and decoration. If you’ve used Bitmoji, HeroCreator, or similar avatar-making tools, it’s pretty easy to get the hang of. I’d never played with it before, and in 20 minutes I had made up my own hypothetical Mandalorian kit!:

when you know the rules, it’s really not that hard to make something that looks passably in-universe

One of the coolest parts—at least for the purposes of training our ‘Star Wars Eye’—is the Armor Gallery feature, where we find (in addition to a few novelty designs and face characters like Din Djarin and the Fetts) a wide variety of completed assemblages submitted by other users.

two easy tweaks to boost your in-universe style accuracy!

Diamonds in the Rough: G. Palmer

Over the years, I’ve seen easily thousands of Star Wars costumers come across my various feeds. While there are plenty of folks with screen-accurate face character outfits in the Legions, the ‘OC’ section of the community can be a little more…hit-or-miss. In this recurring feature, I’ll be sharing my interviews with several stand-out examples of the foundation of what we aspire to do here – accurately portraying the common galactic citizen. I hope that these individuals can help illustrate what Star Wars ‘reenacting’—or at the very least, high-quality in-universe costuming—looks like, and provide some insights into their character creations.

In our first entry, we’re spotlighting G. Palmer, who has put together a first-rate impression of a common droid mechanic:

SWLH: What was your initial inspiration for this character design?
GP: I was inspired by the kinds of background characters that are seen for a few seconds and then disappear around a corner or through a doorway.

Interview continues in-depth within

Talk the talk, walk the walk

Whenever I come across someone online showing off an original Star Wars costume, few things can make it feel out-of-universe faster than visible Earthly fasteners. This should come as no surprise, as the lack of visible fasteners (zippers, buttons, etc) was one of Lucas’ chief design points when creating the original film’s visual style (see Alinger’s SWCOT). While working on a future installment of Galactic Style Guide, I realized I should probably lead by example and make sure none of my own kit pieces broke this rule…and if any did, to fix them ASAP!

Since a lot of my gear has been purpose-built for GFFA living history, most of it is fastener-free. However, some of the milsurp pieces I use would need tweaking; the first of these was my satchel, originally an M9A1 gas mask bag: