Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy

Diamonds in the Rough – Colin “OddViking” Adams (part 1)

Welcome back to our monthly spotlight series, where we discuss Star Wars costumers who have ‘gone the distance’ and put in the effort to create solid, in-universe outfits or personas. This is actually the first half of a two-parter, because our subject has gone so totally above and beyond and built an incredible kit with tons of details that spreading it out over two months is the only way to really do it justice!

If you’ve spent any time exploring Star Wars content on Instagram in the last several years, chances are you’ve seen Colin Adams’ incredible work before. As a professional graphic designer/illustrator, Colin has a very large bag of tools to draw from, and puts them all to good use with a number of impressive cosplays and kits, each fully-detailed and seamlessly dropped into immersive settings with the magic of Photoshop. At the beginning of this year, when I saw Colin was starting a custom Mandalorian build, I knew the final result would be amazing. As we’ve discussed previously in our First Steps series, one of the keys to successfully creating an effective GFFA character is to dedicate time at the beginning of the process to doing your research and really nailing down what the ‘outer persona’ should look like.

creating this incredible mando kit, step by step

Galactic Style Guide – Text

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 faux pas that can make your kit 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!
This month, we’re taking a look at a design phenomenon that’s big on the Disney side of things (whether it be in films made under them, things sold by them, or costumes worn by fans while visiting them) but which was only ever a minimal part of the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’: text on stuff!

The fact that we went six films with zero non-technical Aurebesh (and the first two, most seminal films had NONE at all) should tell you everything you need to know: when it comes to Aurebesh on kit items, it’s always superfluous.
With that in mind, I want to look at some examples to illustrate why you’re better off omitting Aurebesh entirely. Out of respect for the SW costuming/maker community, I’m focusing on publicly-available items sold by Disney, but the point is still applicable: even when executed correctly it’s still largely* unnecessary, and—if used at all—should act as a garnish, not a side dish – let alone the main course! If your impression is relying on Aurebesh to make sense, something’s not working and it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

*As we saw before, pretty much the only folks we saw wearing Aurebesh pre-Disney are prisoners and biker-gang types. Occasionally we see small identifiers like ‘crew’ or ‘staff’, but these simply serve to demonstrate the wearer’s membership in a group as separate from the public.
For a refresher on examples of places where we do commonly see in-universe lettering, check out this GSG entry.

Let’s start off with a couple items featuring completely redundant Aurebesh additions. Did you ever notice that all the top brass at the Death Star’s conference room had matching drinkware?

Here’s the version sold at Galaxy’s Edge:

From one side, it just looks like a slick space-fascist travel mug. From the other side though, it looks like the Empire thinks its officers need to be constantly reminded of who they work for.

more Bad aurebesh products, and how to prevent them!

Diamonds in the Rough – Keith Olsen

Welcome back to our monthly spotlight series, where we discuss Star Wars costumers who have ‘gone the distance’ and put in the effort to create solid, in-universe outfits or personas. This month’s entry comes from Keith Olsen, who has done his research to put together an excellent impression of a generic ‘Pyke Syndicate’ soldier.

As you can see, this build was initially inspired by the appearance of the Pykes as seen on ‘The Book of Boba Fett‘ (though as I’ll discuss in a bit, an animated-style Pyke would look quite different!), and as such is based at around 5 ABY.

Keith did a lot of old-school costume replication legwork – unless something goes on display for an exhibit, this typically involves very carefully scrutinizing screenshots – to determine the materials and types of clothing that could be bought off the shelf for this outfit.
Let’s examine the elements one by one!

keep reading for the full breakdown and details

Galactic Style Guide – Ponchos II

Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, the bimonthly 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 ponchos, focusing on examples from the prequel era! (As a reminder: for our purposes, we’re defining a poncho as a garment worn as an outer layer for protection from the elements, which covers the front of the body).
Let’s keep things rolling with the poncho I think I would most want to curl up in:

Qui-Gon wears this poncho when venturing into Mos Espa in Episode I—the script specifying that he is “dressed as a moisture farmer”. Trisha Biggar notes that the coarse-weave is a silk/linen mix and that the border is “printed”—though I’m not sure what exactly that means (Dressing A Galaxy, p20).

Take a good look at that beautiful nubby texture!

keep reading for many more examples

Galactic Style Guide – Ponchos I

Welcome back to another installment of the Galactic Style Guide, the bimonthly series where we break down the ‘Star Wars aesthetic’ in order to help you create a more authentic ‘outer persona’! It’s been a minute since our last entry in this series, but here on the last weekend of Star Wars Month, we’re taking a look at examples of garments which have been part of the GFFA look since the very beginning: ponchos! For our purposes, we’re defining a poncho as a garment worn as an outer layer for protection from the elements and which covers the front of the body; things like capes and cloaks tend to be open in the front and worn more for form than function (hence their frequent use by ‘classes’ like gamblers and politicians). As we’ll see, ponchos on the other hand are almost always associated with salt-of-the-earth folks who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Let’s dig in!

The first poncho we see in the Original Trilogy is worn by Luke as part of his farmboy attire:

While it’s a fun idea, as we’ll see next month, this is *not* Qui-Gon’s poncho.

more examples inside!

AgriCorps Jedi impression (2023) – hard kit

This month, I’m switching things up and making an effort to lay out my current complete kits for GFFA reenacting/living history. The clothes (soft kit) worn by a Jedi in the AgriCorps are only one part of that impression – what about field gear???

“What do the Jedi carry in their pockets? String, or nothing! In The Phantom Menace we see that the Jedi wear utility belts, and just as Batman always has the right tool for the job the Jedi would therefore carry anything the writer needed them to have in a particular story, up to and including space-shark repellent. … The Jedi would never be caught without a breather, a comlink, food capsules, etc.” (Dan Wallace, endnotes for The Jedi Path, #3 of 4)

The basic needs can be covered by a belt kit which holds the necessary tools, a canteen for hydration, and a satchel (M9A1) for a couple larger items.

What’s inside? I’m glad you asked!

keep reading for Jedi field gear EDC breakdown

AgriCorps Jedi impression (2023) – soft kit

Somehow, it’s been almost seven years since I first entertained the idea of doing first-person interpretive workshops in the Star Wars setting, and since then my various portrayals have evolved quite a lot! Although a reenacting kit is never ‘finished’—but I’m a perfectionist who likes to wait until something is complete before sharing (hence why I rarely share full-kit updates! – see the problem here?)—I want to try and lay out each of my ‘complete kits’ in their most up-to-date form, summarizing the background research and justifications for choices that I’ve made to create each impression. All of this is intended to serve as an example of what solid, research-based fictional living history looks like. Because they will inevitably get pushed down the blog’s front page, these posts will be collected at the new PERSONAS AND IMPRESSIONS page ^above^!

I want to start with the impression that first got me thinking about ‘doing Star Wars‘ in a reenacting/living history sense – a ‘washout Jedi’ member of the Agricultural Service Corps.

Galactic Style Guide – Colored Lenses & Visors

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!
In past entries, we’ve looked at things that aren’t really part of the typical ‘galactic aesthetic’: bright colors, visible fasteners, overly-designed patchwork clothing, etc. This month, we’re going to focus on an element of character design which is present in the visual record, but which has a very specific pattern of usage and which is far overrepresented in the fan-costuming community.

Good reenacting—fictional or historical—typically deals less with the elites of a given culture/period/setting, and more with accurately representing the experience of its common people. Since the current paradigm of Star Wars ‘Original Character’ costuming seems to entirely revolve around 3D printing, armor, and helmets, if you want to create an armored or helmeted ‘OC’ that will faithfully represent a typical galactic inhabitant, then listen up and read on!

There’s one easy way to tell at a glance if an armored Star Wars character is somehow SPECIAL: just look at their helmet! If the lenses or visor are anything other than plain black*, you can bet money that they’re some sort of elite. Some examples from the good old EU:

Shae Visla (**Mandalore** the Avenger!), Utapau shadow scouts/Clone shadow trooper, clone commandos, **Commander** Gree and 41st scout trooper (*Episode III*), shadow trooper, shadow EVO trooper, and Emperor’s Shadow Guard (*The Force Unleashed*)

Notice anything?

Keep reading for recent post-disney examples, and analysis!

Diamonds in the Rough – Mandalorian foundling

Welcome back to our monthly spotlight series, where we discuss Star Wars costumers who have ‘gone the distance’ and put in the effort to create solid, in-universe outfits or personas. This month’s entry is actually a bit of a carry-over from last month, because while building his own Mandalorian ‘Kryos’ kit, T.H. also created a simple but highly-effective outfit for his own youngling at home:

Less is more!

Drawing on history

Back in 2015, a museum exhibit in Belarus showed off a set of reconstructed costumes from early medieval (8th-12th centuries CE) Baltic cultures. Shortly afterwards, the outfits began making the rounds online, eventually getting shared to a Middle-earth reenactment group I’m a part of. We all thought they were very impressive: inspiring examples of what culturally-cohesive outfits can look like. Then, a year or two ago, I saw the exact same pictures again—but this time in a Batuu-bounding group on facebook! There, they were prefaced with a message like, “check these out – wouldn’t these make great bounding outfits?!”

While they are still great outfits, as-is, I had to disagree with the idea that they would be appropriate for GFFA use. As Doug Chiang pointed out in a recent interview, the thing that makes Star Wars feel so authentic as a setting is the eclectic use of mix-and-matched historical inspirations* (thanks largely to John Mollo’s foundational designs)—not merely using unmodified, straight-up historical ensembles! [As it’s pure gold, I’ve included Doug’s full quote at the end of this post, so keep reading.]
However, I could definitely see the appeal, especially in the outfits’ silhouettes, and challenged myself to apply a GFFA lens to the Baltic costumes and see if I couldn’t bring them nearer to the Star Wars aesthetic. I challenge you to try the same thing with other historical styles you may be inspired to use in your own outfit!

Let’s start with the red kit first. My main method used was to try and find an in-universe equivalent to each item: