Galactic Style Guide – Mechanics and Technicians I

Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, the series where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’! By audience request, in this entry we’re trying something different! This time around, we’re not looking at a specific category of clothing or gear, but a specific “character class”! Just like with our regular Style Guide entries, the idea is still to analyze examples of a single theme to see what they share – and therefore see what the most common and representative elements are, hopefully to prevent the spread of reenactorisms! As always, there’s plenty of room in the Galactic Costumed-Arts Spectrum for fun and personal interpretations, but if (as I believe is entirely possible) the GFFA is to be seen as a legitimate setting for high-quality living history, it really pays to take a page from the reenacting playbook and try to represent the common galactic populace as faithfully as possible…which means sticking to the visual ‘rules’ of the setting. What are those rules for mechanic/technician characters? Let’s find out!

As the majority of SW titles continue to revolve around face characters from the more ‘exciting’ (i.e. typically martial) character classes (Jedi, fighter pilots, bounty hunters, troopers, etc.), we have a relatively small pool to draw from, at least when it comes to live-action. Our first look at this type of character comes from act three of SW’77, with our heroes’ arrival at the Rebel base on Yavin IV.

While some wear Fleet Trooper-style helmets (of some variety or other), all wear a basic uniform of tan coveralls and a belt. On their lower half, the vast majority wear their pant legs over their boots – which, as we’ve seen, is a fairly rare style in the GFFA. As I noted last time, I find it quite coincidental that the only member of the Rebel ground crew with his pants tucked into his jackboots is also the only one with a speaking part (watch closely, and you’ll see this is true for the pilots as well)! As was the case with the closing ceremony, my theory is that the reason so many of these characters wear untucked pants is chiefly budgetary, as it would’ve been too expensive or difficult to outfit all of them with proper jackboots – but more of them probably should be. This is exactly what we see in Rogue One, which shows a higher proportion of the crew with taller footwear, giving a generally SWarsier narrow-ankle silhouette! (See below)

In the first act of Episode V, we see the Rebels still have need of technicians to work on their vehicles, but they’re sensibly dressed for the frigid temps of Echo Base, wearing the same tan coverall as at Yavin, but paired with a vest, mukluks, and an insulated hat:

(I am not including Episode VI‘s Rebel ‘communication technicians’ in our analysis, for the simple reason that they seem more analogous to IT personnel or switchboard operators – as opposed to the mechanical blue-collar ‘grease monkey’ technician archetype we’re dealing with here.

Looking to the Prequels next, we have several more examples. On Naboo, we briefly see the Royal hangar crew comes in two flavors: mustard yellow and rusty red-brown; they all wear unique double-breasted coverall suits with wide integral belt loops, a belt, boots, and engineer helmets:

As Episode I‘s main setpiece revolves around the in-universe equivalent of the Indy 500, it’s no surprise that we see many mechanics in the podrace pit crews. As ‘featured extras’ these can often be spotted in the background of most Mos Espa scenes but often appear around the podrace in twos or threes; there’s a good deal of variety in their accessories and other layers, but they all appear to be wearing long-sleeved coveralls of some kind or other.

Combing through the various Visual Dictionaries, we next find this pair: the first was identified simply as ‘mechanic’ and later as ‘Coruscant landing pad crew’; the second as ‘Coruscant spaceport crew’, although in Dressing A Galaxy he’s pictured with a bunch of extras from either the refugee transport or the undercity around the Outlander Club. If you have more info or better pictures of him, please pass them along! If you look closely, you’ll note that #1’s coveralls have a number of visible zippers, which we’ve discussed in a previous installment. We can also see that #2 isn’t actually wearing coveralls but baggy trousers and a matching jacket, though the overall look is similar (remember, the standards for extreme background folks’ outfits are much lower than foregrounders!).

Now, for an extreme deep cut, we have a rare Bad Guy datapoint: the ‘Imperial mechanics’ from Episode VI:

These guys are essentially dressed as the dark side version of the crews at Yavin (though it looks like they don’t even get belts?): ‘talker’-style helmet and a plain navy blue boiler suit; unknown if they blouse their pants or not, but it looks like not.

Unfortunately, the above seem to be the only clear technician-type characters seen in the Lucas films, but they still provide a decent sample to analyze. We can add a few more by looking at post-Disney titles.
As we mentioned earlier, since Rogue One is meant to depict the Rebels’ Yavin base at the same time period as SW’77, the look of the hangar technicians is generally similar. The major change is that more of them are seen wearing bloused trousers over ankle boots, and the degree of weathering is much higher.

The background extras of Rogue One also include one ‘Gavra Ubrento’, said to be part of a roving band of mechanics; while she’s obviously wearing a one-piece coverall, it’s hard to tell what her footwear situation is, but her pants are definitely not baggy ‘Yavin-style’, and she might be wearing something like engineer boots. Her outfit includes a belt, printed details on the upper right front, and elasticated cuffs in a rare contrasting color, as well as a geometric design on the back:

The Mandalorian introduced us to Amy Sedaris’ character Peli Motto, whose outfit brings in some interesting design choices.

Up to this point, all the mechanics and technicians we’ve seen wearing coveralls have been wearing coveralls made of one material. Peli’s, on the other hand, pairs a fabric body with what appears to be leather sleeves, with tooled panels at the cuffs, collar, and shoulders, and asymmetric sleeve details. And a comm badge greeble. And a greeble on her tool pouch. And quilted knee reinforcements (those I don’t mind). And weird chunky armor things on the tops of her boots. I dunno, all I’m saying is: compared to what came before, it’s a weirdly over-designed character design; her concept art was much simpler and more in line with the prevailing style.

Okay, I know we’re limiting our sample to live-action, but I’m including this last one in this entry as it’s from animation and not just 2D print materials (that’s for next time!). I haven’t seen any of the later Clone Wars, but I kept seeing folks cosplaying as ‘mechanic Ahsoka Tano’, so I looked it up.

We see that she’s wearing yet another one-piece coverall with unbloused pants, though I think this is our first example of less-than-elbow-length sleeves. It’s clear they’ve been rolled up to reach this height, but it’s not clear how long they’d be if rolled down. As TCW was fond of doing, her otherwise plain suit has a colorblocked panel running from the armpit down the outside of the legs where it wraps around the calf/shin. She also has gold piping on the front hip area and the flap of her chest pockets. As the suit seems less pocketed compared to earlier examples, she is kitted out with a pair of hip pouches for tools etc.

I’ve learned there’s also a droid mechanic character in the Outlaws game, Gedeek Obaz:

As we would expect, he wears a light brown, one-piece, longsleeved (elastic cuffs!) coverall with stand collar, under what looks like a leather vest. A couple things stand out to me–such as the misaligned Imperial cog on the upper arm (despite neither the character nor the coverall being very Imperial), and the RenFaire-ish overly-accessorized belt. However, the weathering is intense and the overall look is still Swarzy; he’ll make a good comparison to the nonSwarzy example I have planned as a ‘formative assessment’ for the end of our next entry.

So, with a decent sample pool of 21, let’s first note that all of our mechanic/technicians have outfits built on coveralls (or garments that give a similar silhouette). We can next quantify this data to see what our mode (most represented) elements are:
Color- tan/khaki: 6, rust: 3, light blue: 3, OD green: 2, mustard: 2, dark blue: 3, teal: 1, light brown: 1. (i.e. over half – 12 of 21 – are earthtones)
Lower leg situation– boots/bloused pants: 13; unbloused pants: 7; puttees: 1
Belt vs. no belt- 3+:2
Sleeves- long vs. short: 20:1
Vest vs. no vest– 2:3
It should go without saying, but please note that all of these outfits are also text-free, button-free and largely visible zipper-free (<15%, which I don’t worry about because they’re are all pretty much far-background characters).
Based on this sample size, we would expect a Statistically Representative Mechanic/Technician to be wearing a long-sleeved tan or khaki utility suit with a belt, and blouse their pants into their boots. (I do note that the high frequency of tan is due to the Alliance’s use of it, so if we look at non-Rebels, then rusty brown or light/faded blue wins.) Either way, I am very curious to see how our results change next time when we add a large batch of designs from print sources into our sample! Join us then, won’t you?

Thanks to my supporters P.D., and R.F. – writing these breakdowns takes a lot of time and energy! If you’ve learned something or been inspired to create a more accurate technician impression, please consider supporting my work via ko-fi, or with a small donation below! Thank you!