Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy
applying the methods of progressive historic reenacting to the Galaxy Far, Far Away
Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, the monthly series where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’! In this entry, we’re continuing our look at the great variety of galactic footwear seen in live-action sources.
If you’re not able to acquire taller boots but still want to get a Star Warsy silhouette, our first two categories are great options!
Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, the monthly series where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’! It’s taken us a few years to get here, but in this entry, we’re finally taking a look at the one element a good costume literally stands upon – shoes! There’s a lot to unpack here, so our first two entries will look at live-action sources, and the third will cover visual examples from EU sources.
I’ve done my best to break these down by category, but my research library is far from exhaustive!; these are mostly drawn from the Complete Visual Dictionary (DK) and Alinger’s SWCOT. (Even if I could afford a copy, Trisha Biggar’s Dressing a Galaxy is not as useful for those of us interested in ‘common’ galactic folk…plus, the prevalence of characters wearing long robes means we don’t often see any footwear anyway!).
Let’s get started by looking at what it seems just about everybody wears in the Galactic Civil War era:
I didn’t include them here (because…y’know, space-fascism), but I should note that most ranking Imperials wear similar boots. If you’re portraying a character in the Civil War period, you really can’t go wrong with something tall, black, and shiny!
Plenty more examples within!Happy New Year’s Eve, and 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 costuming faux pas that can make an outfit look Not Star Warsy. 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!
Although notably absent in the original film (and the Prequels), the pieces of wearable technology discussed in this early Style Guide entry have become nearly ubiquitous in the post-Disney era and among the casual costuming/Batuu-bounding communities. These devices’ purposes have been inconsistently identified, but most sources suggest they are either communication devices or personal transponders—think a wearable ‘Personal Locator Beacon’. (These differ from the plaques worn by Imperial and Rebel officers throughout the Original Trilogy, which clearly served to denote the wearer’s rank, and about which this article is not concerned!)
Despite being fairly limited in the visual record, “jacket greeblies” are frequently relied on by costumers to add ‘GFFA spice’ to an outfit, and the proliferation of 3D printing in the last decade has unleashed a flood of fan-made iterations of these wearable doodads. However, not all fan-made greeblies are created equal, so I wanted to try and ‘crack the code’ to see what makes the onscreen examples ‘work’ and some fan designs work…not so well.
It is important to note that when they show up in Episodes V and VI, we really only see these devices worn by Rebel Alliance personnel (with one possible underwhelming exception). If we look at our samples, we note that those from Empire are constructed in a different manner than those seen in Jedi: while they were kitbashed originally, the pieces worn onscreen were resin casts (Alinger, 86), which is perfect for outfitting dozens of background troops but limits the amount of detail seen on the final product:
Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, the monthly series where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’! In this entry, we’re taking a look at examples of a rarely-seen category of ‘pocket trash’ which can really help to ground an impression in the Galaxy Far Far Away – we’re talking ID cards!
To show the evolution over time, I’ve chosen to present these in real-world chronological order, starting with examples from the West End Games era.
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 costuming faux pas that can make an outfit look Not Star Warsy. 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!
Our last two Style Guide entries on jackets concluded with a bit of homework. I wanted us to look at our source examples and pay special attention to the design elements of each jacket, particularly any areas that used different-colored paneling, the placement of any added details, and the overall degree of symmetry. All of these contribute to this month’s theme of “Design”.
As we’ve seen in previous posts, there are several aspects which are commonly seen in GFFA upper-body outerwear and—taken as a whole—contribute to ‘the Star Wars ‘look”’. In addition to a muted color palette, these include:
Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, the monthly series where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’! As I promised last month, this entry is devoted to examples of in-universe jackets drawn from the various sources of the Expanded Universe and ancillary materials. Let’s get started with the two jacket-wearers seen in the New Essential Guide to Alien Species:
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 99% 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.
Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, the monthly series where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’!
Folks have been asking me to do a post on in-universe jackets for a long time, so I figured the best time is Now! In fact, I dug up so many examples that this is going to be a two-parter (it feels like we haven’t had one of those in a while)! This month, we’re looking exclusively at examples from live-action sources.
For our purposes, when we say ‘jackets’ we are talking about sleeved, (typically open-front) roughly waist-length outer garments; longer garments along these lines would be considered coats (and will be discussed in a later entry!).
As we’ll see, these garments have been a big part of the GFFA style since day one:
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!:
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!Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’! While the Style Guide has traditionally been concerned with topics of clothing and personal adornment, one’s outer persona can also include GEAR. Well, summer has arrived and after spending half of last year in a tent with my wife on the Appalachian Trail, I had two questions on my mind:
1) what kinds of shelters might adventurers in the Galaxy Far, Far Away use to protect themselves from the elements? And 2) are there any tents readily available in 2022 that might approximate these galactic styles?
The answer may surprise you!
While this topic might not be much use to readers planning a visit to the Galactic Starcruiser or their local fan convention, it’s important to remember that ‘doing (in the reenacting/living history sense) Star Wars‘ can (and probably should) take more authentic forms, and that if you want to venture into the outlands or create an in-universe encampment—like say, for an upcoming GFFA airsoft event?—having a good shelter can really come in handy.
While tents seen in earlier Star Wars materials (or only described in text) tend towards the unrealistic (at least by current capabilities)*, many shelters from visual media are actually fairly mundane, which is great for those wishing to create a reenacting encampment, or undertake an in-universe backpacking trip! *for a perfect example of this, see Mace Windu’s “wallet tent” in the novel Shatterpoint, which packed down to the size of a pocket yet could automatically unfold into a two-person shelter
Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy 