Tag: fashion

Image Analysis: Garqi Agricultural Academy

(image originally published in WotC’s Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds (2004), artwork by Langdon Foss.)

This image is a great ‘slice of life’ for children on an agricultural backwater—sort of a Star Wars Norman Rockwell scene: who hasn’t been a youngling ‘flying’ toy spaceships around while making PEW-PEW sounds? But what’s more important is how especially valuable this image is for the rare look it gives us at GFFA commoners’ fashion. Here are a few pertinent tidbits I’ve teased out:
Continue reading “Image Analysis: Garqi Agricultural Academy”

Revisiting the winter hat

(Apologies for my delay in postings of late…with winter holidays arrived I now have a few weeks’ reprieve from school-matters, which I intend to use to finish up some posts and projects for this site).

Last winter, as I reskinned my Swedish milsurp hat, I was left with a few quibbles. (I find it’s helpful to write down these thoughts for just this very reason, so that I know what needs tweaking should I decide to revisit the project down the road):

“Were I to undertake this project again, I would’ve done a few things differently:
-using a heavier khaki material–like the plentiful scraps I had leftover from my donut helmet (uncovered only after I had finished this project!)
-only using two layers of wool for the flaps, instead of three.
-better copying the shape of the curvy panels that are added to the flaps.
-making the rear ribbed panel shorter (to better match the original artwork), while extending the neck coverage and shortening up the flaps a bit.”

As the weather has been getting cooler, I’ve been having to wear my flap hat more often, and as I’ve also been integrating more and more Star Wars style into my daily wardrobe, I finally felt that the vaguely-close-enough-ness of my hat just wasn’t accurate (or hardcore) enough.
And so, after pondering on what would be involved, I decided to go ahead and tackle the Pfilbee Jhorn Hat, Mark II.PfilbeeJhorn1

^ The look we’re going for^

Continue reading “Revisiting the winter hat”

Project: Modding a Jacket

wools-beforeafter
In my continuing quest to subtly apply a Star Wars commoner’s aesthetic to my everyday wardrobe, I consistently make at least a weekly pass through my local secondhand shop to look for garments which have GFFA modification potential. As someone who also puts a lot of focus on having a wardrobe that not only looks good but also is practical for outdoor use (i.e. I try to avoid slow-drying cotton and melty synthetics as much as possible) I have been searching for a good Star Wars-y jacket that looks the part but isn’t plain unlined cotton or light linen.

Thankfully, I’ve had some good hunting of late; so when a fine 100% wool ladies’ blazer ($6) made by PENDLETON came up the other day, I quickly snatched it up with an eye for modification.
Continue reading “Project: Modding a Jacket”

Ode to the Side-Release Buckle

 

 

While I currently have several projects on the proverbial back burner–waiting on, among other things, a modeler, a printer, and a blacksmith–I am doing my best to keep the blog from lapsing into content-hiatus. This week, I offer a simple collection of images, centered around the humble side-release buckle. This piece of costume hardware was apparently commonplace throughout the Galaxy, and so would be an appropriate item to include in one’s GFFA kit.
Continue reading “Ode to the Side-Release Buckle”

Project: modding the Naboo winter shirt

(My apologies for the unintentional hiatus, dear readers. Back-to-school is a hectic time, but as I get back into the swing of things, I am able to get back to work on projects and keeping up the blog.)

silk_beforeafter

Between the cooler temperatures, low humidity, and new-fallen leaves (ideal for making debris shelters and leaf mattresses), it’s no surprise that autumn is the go-to season for most reenactors.
Even though the events that are most welcoming for a Star Wars ‘living historian’—sci-fi cons and the like—are traditionally held in air-conditioned hotels in summer, there is no reason why you should limit yourself to such controlled indoor events! I believe that if this particular hobby is to (one day ) be taken seriously by the larger Historic reenacting community, we should be as equipped as they are to deal with weather of all seasons, and not be afraid to get Out of the convention center!
Continue reading “Project: modding the Naboo winter shirt”

Building the Rebel persona – 4.1: Naboo soft kit

Based on the broad trends noted in the previous post, I decided that my Naboo civilian impression would need (at minimum) a tunic, trousers, and tall boots, and possibly an outer layer as well.
shirt
The tunic would need to follow local style, and so be in a muted color, have an overlapping and/or asymmetrical closure, a high Mandarin collar, and long sleeves, probably without cuffs.
Continue reading “Building the Rebel persona – 4.1: Naboo soft kit”

Searching for civilian style on Naboo

When I first started toying with the idea of portraying a Rebel ‘partisan’, I knew I wanted to integrate elements of the local planetary fashion, but also include enough elements of the larger galactic style so that the impression would still be recognizably Star Wars.
Finding the right ratio between the two would be the real trick, since a) Naboo’s nobles in the late Republic period tended to dress in an impractical, distinct Renaissance style, b) we don’t really know what Naboo fashion was like during the Imperial period, and as I’ve written before, it’s hard to be taken seriously as a guerilla fighter when you’re dressed like Catherine de Medici. If I wanted to pull this off, I was going to have to do some detective work.
 Continue reading “Searching for civilian style on Naboo”

Building the Sulon Rebel – 4: Soft kit

What follows is a breakdown of the practical kit I eventually assembled for a Rebel ‘partizan’ persona, based on Sulon around 4-5 years ABY.

I. Soft Kit:

When starting to plan out what clothes a Rebel partisan on Sulon would wear, I didn’t have a lot of reference material to build from; the three Dark Forces novellas are each illustrated by three different artists with wildly different styles, and as typical Star Wars media, tend not to focus on the mundane minutiae of everyday citizens.
This gave me a certain amount of freedom, but I still wanted to keep things fairly conservative while starting out (a wise approach to take while reenacting in general!) Continue reading “Building the Sulon Rebel – 4: Soft kit”

Building the Jedi Persona – 3: Soft Kit

What follows is an itemized breakdown of the kit I eventually put together for my AgriCorps ‘washout’ Jedi impression, based during the Dark Times.
Agri1The main thing I wanted to do with this persona was to help subtly differentiate it from the Jedi we’ve seen already and with whom we are most familiar. Continue reading “Building the Jedi Persona – 3: Soft Kit”

Step 5 – Craft It!

Now that you know what you want to do (as a reenactor or interpreter), who you’re going to portray (your persona), and (after careful research and/or use of the Galactic Style Guide) what you’re going to wear while doing it, the time has come to gear up and clothe your persona in appropriate ‘garb’. If you know how to sew, great! If not, it’s always a good time to learn! A simple websearch for ‘basic sewing stitches’ will yield plenty of tutorials. Even though we’re depicting a high-tech society, tailor droids break down now and then, so hand-sewing is fine too! (the first time I made my Jedi tunics, I opted to sew the main seams with a sewing machine, and then finish the seams by hand).

When it comes to making or buying elements of one’s kit, it always pays to remember The Designer’s Paradox:

fast-cheap-good-design-diagram
You can have it CHEAP, you can have it FAST, or you can have it GOOD.
Choose carefully, because you can only pick two!

In other words, getting something cheap and good takes time; fast and good costs money up-front, while cheap and fast will cost you in the long run.

Since there are plenty of how-to pages out there (costume tutorials abound on the internet), I will try to keep this short and sweet.
A quick primer on fabrics and their properties as they pertain to our purposes: Continue reading “Step 5 – Craft It!”