Galactic Style Guide – Buttons

Welcome to another installment of our ‘Galactic Style Guide counterpoint’ subseries, where we help you strengthen your ‘Star Wars eye’ by highlighting and addressing commonly-made costuming faux pas. As part of the GSG, the ultimate goal is still to help you create a more accurate ‘outer persona’ – but we approach the goal from the opposite direction!

Since the earliest designs of Star Wars ’77, one of the main signifiers of GFFA fashion is the absence of visible fasteners—as chief costume designer John Mollo said, “George didn’t want any fastenings to show, he didn’t want to see buttons, he didn’t want to see zips, so we used stuff like Velcro, and things were just wrapped over and tied with a belt…” – The Making of Star Wars (J.W. Rinzler), p. 125.
Since this is one of the chief ‘rules’ of Star Wars fashion and comes straight from the top, something like 98% of the outfits seen onscreen abide by this rule. When visible fastenings do show up on screen, eagle-eyed costume-minded folks (or those who really want to cut corners) tend to make a big deal of it….although they really shouldn’t.

When the subject of buttons or other visible fasteners comes up in discussions online, it’s often a case of someone saying, ‘Look at all these guys at the medal ceremony!’ or ‘Yeah, my outfit has buttons and I know they’re supposed to be forbidden, but Jango Fett had them on his shirt!‘ While that may be true, when the rule is ‘fasteners shouldn’t be seen’, then the answer is simple: Fasteners. Shouldn’t. Be. Seen. I don’t know which Episode II costume department intern didn’t get the memo and put Tem Morrison in a blue Henley with collar buttons, but there’s really no excuse for it. The others I can ignore, since they’re all either background characters seen in low light (Limbic*, the cantina band and Sleazebaggano), ‘seat filler’ characters who needed to be dressed cheaply en masse (the Yavin crowd), or a 2-second pickup shot for the Special Edition (Chyler). Everyone else below is from low-budget mid-90s LucasArts FMV cutscenes, or lower-tier print sources where there’s not as much oversight and plenty of artistic license.
*As I recently learned, there’s a really good explanation for ol’ Brainiac’s costume having buttons at the collar – just like the background Duros who wears a zippered Planet of the Apes spacesuit, this costume is another case of the SW’77 cantina folks simply renting and reusing an existing costume from an previous production – in this case, the 1940s serial Spy Smasher!

As you can see, if there’s one item of clothing that EU illustrators can’t resist slapping buttons on, it’s double-breasted coats and jackets.

It may (or may not) surprise you, but even properties backed by the infinite Disney budget aren’t immune to sloppy costuming gaffes; I remember reading plenty of digital hand-wringing when Bill Burr showed up in Mandalorian S02E07 wearing a sleeveless M65 field jacket:

So there we go. This post is not intended to excuse lazy costuming, but to illustrate the importance of critical thinking in authentic, high-quality GFFA costuming. As we’ve seen above, not every creator of licensed Star Wars content is as dialed into the rules of the setting as we aspire to be, and buttons, zippers, shoelaces, etc. are going to sneak in here and there; it’s okay to call them out when you see them, but that doesn’t make their presence okay. Once you know the rule, follow it!, encourage others to do so too, and do your best to present the idealized Galaxy where these elements are never seen. There are bound to be outliers and eccentrics in every setting, but just as in recreating costume of actual history, when doing Star Wars costuming it is simply Best Practices to follow the most-represented example or style, and turn a critical eye to that which diverges. As one of our SWLH facebook community members said in a recent discussion: “Just as in all things SW, don’t seek out the one tiny exception…seek out the flavor of the world and fit into it.” And when the flavor of the world is ‘no visible fasteners’, then cover up your darn buttons.

ADDENDUM #1: one of our SWLH facebook community members with an extensive collection of Naboo costume references revealed to us that several of Padme’s outfits include buttoned cuffs or other details! Now I’m going to have to take a closer closer look at my library of Naboo costumes and see if there are any other examples! I don’t mind these so much as they’re all pretty much relegated to the extremities (versus straight down the front), and achieved using fabric-covered buttons and hence match their surroundings.
Compare these with the following anomaly…
ADDENDUM #2: While going through my Prequel costumes library, I came across this closeup used as the frontispiece to Trisha Biggar’s Dressing a Galaxy. “Who the hell’s hands (and buttons) are those???” I wondered.

With a little digging, the answer seems to be none other than Senator Orn Free Taa in Episode II:

He may be a named character, but he’s still in the background. This makes me wonder at the statistically-higher appearances of buttons in the Prequels, and if it wasn’t intended as a way to subtly show an older time period? Visible buttons are still the exception to the rule, but if you aren’t willing to find a way to fully remove the buttons from a piece of kit, at the very least use some sort of more traditional cloth-covered or ‘shank buttons’, instead of modern holed buttons:

ADDENDUM #3!: After some close examination, it appears that Aunt Beru’s jacket would have closed not with buttons, but with rolled fabric toggles and loops. Does this count as a “visible fastener”? Maybe. Of course we never actually see it worn this way, but it’s an interesting non-button closure method – the fact that they’re made out of matching material makes them fairly inconspicuous compared to the alternatives.

Are there any style outliers I’ve left out? Leave them in the comments!
If the idea of actually hiding your outfit’s buttons or zippers is a little overwhelming, how-to tutorials are on the way! Join us then, won’t you?

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