Let’s talk about fish-lady sweaters for a second.
When a Mon Calamari showed up in The Mandalorian Chapter 11 wearing an off-the-rack fisherman’s sweater, the community lost no time in memeifying it before hopping on Amazon to snatch up one or two for themselves. I find it encouraging that people are interested in costuming a common civilian for once (instead of the rare-in-universe but over-represented-in-cosplay Jedi/Sith/Mando/bounty hunter ‘player classes’)…but if I was looking to put together a GFFA dockworker impression, I definitely wouldn’t go out and buy the exact onscreen sweater—and not just because they’re probably now very scarce! Here’s why.
When I started putting together a Rebel partizan impression a few years back, I initially had the idea—inspired by real-life guerillas’ practice of appropriating enemy equipment—to include a piece or two of captured Imperial hardware in the kit. I was very aware of the temptation to overdo it…too many cosplayers let their imaginations run wild and pretty soon a simple ‘Rebel fighter’ costume becomes an unrealistically fully-armored supertrooper. Since s Alliance doctrine holds that “complete freedom of movement is more useful than the dubious protection provided by armor—which rarely stops a blaster bolt anyway” (WestEndGames, Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, p99), we don’t have a ton of examples of Rebels wearing extensive armor; even this more modern source depicts a Rebel ‘heavy’ gunner with only an arm’s worth of armor:
Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy 