Thoughts on Discovery Starfleet Uniforms (Trailer Edition)

Ooh, that's pretty nice indeed!

 

I'm a little disappointed. It seems a logical choice if we are moving forward from Enterprise continuity. I thought they'd abandon most of TOS design, but I guess deep down I was hoping I'd be wrong and we'd get more color and TOS style cues in the uniforms and sets. Those bright gold/silver side panels will only be flattering on the thinnest crew members.

 

Given how tight fitting most of the Trek uniform designs have been, this is par for the course.

 

So... if the show is on for several years, do you think we'll see the uniforms (and the internal ship decor) change to be more like TOS by the end?

 

no.

 

Yeah. It's a visual reboot. It'll very likely chart it's own course.

 

The rank pips are my only gripe with the uniform. I'd have preferred something more like TOS-style rings around the wrists, since they'd be a lot easier to spot than those tiny pips on the badge. But that's a minor issue. Otherwise they're already some of my favorite Trek uniforms, mostly because they actually look like uniforms.

 

I think they look great. Sleek and modern and understated. I love the collars. Purple looks good (or is it Royal Blue?)! Love them. If Anovos sells them at a reasonable price () then I might pick one up.

 

i like the uniforms.

 

That's a good one.

 

Do you think it's possible that there is a more TOS style shirt as part of the uniform but underneath the jacket/blouson that they are wearing that we can't see (possibly Georgiou prefers a more formal look than Pike?).

 

This is one of those things I've never understood. A lot of regular uniforms aren't much different to TNG. It might be easy to differentiate between the bird and the bars - but most people would have to squint to see it from the far side of a large room. Especially if trying to tell betweena major and Lt colonel.

The TNG style was perfect. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not (I probably should know with the amount of costuming resources I have to hand!) but it ensured that you saw the rank in close ups and headshots. It was a bit more visible than that, but it ensured it was visible to the viewer - and would be having a face to face conversation.

 

I'm fairly ambivalent about these. I don't wildly dislike them; they have a fairly generic typical "Sci-Fi-uniform" look about them that works in and of itself but, on the other hand, I'm not wholly convinced about the relationship to established Trek. The overall production design definitely looks more JJ-verse / Kelvin timeline than it does Prime timeline.

It was never going to be realistic to expect the Studio to agree to using costumes that were totally compatible with The Cage or WNMHGB. Even if this series *is* meant to be set ten years before TOS, the modern casual audience would never understand that -- and this is the audience they need to pick up and carry with them, not the hardcore Trek fans. Something sleeker and more in keeping with a "modern" sensibility of what a Sci-Fi costume should look like was an inevitable compromise, so I don't hold that against them. The same is also true for the rest of the production design.

There are, it has to be said, some nice touches in that the shade of blue for the base colour harks back to the Enterprise costumes and the metallic accent colours for the divisions cleverly hark back to the original division colours of the TOS pilots rather than the primary colours of TOS-proper.

The bright lighting sometimes washes out the colour making all the chest badges just look slivery, but in other lighting it's more obvious that they definitely are in the division colours. I agree that the lower inside curve of the thicker limb of the arrowhead seems to carry TNG-like rank pips. The images released so far aren't great in the level of detail they show but, as far as I can tell, the equivalent of the "solid" pips from TNG are embossed (that is, raised up from the background surface of the badge) and the equivalent of the black-centred pips from TNG (Lt JG and LtCdr) are actually debossed (that is, sunken into the surface of the material). They could just be black discs on the surface of the badge but in some pics there's definitely a suggestion of light catching the lower rim of the top (dark) pip, hence suggesting a debossed "negative" pip. Hopefully we'll get some better pics soon.

On the other hand, I definitely don't like the use of the Starfleet arrowhead for the side panels -- waaaaaay to much like the JJ-verse. It looked twee and over-designed on the shirts from ST and STID and looks the same here. Equally, I don't much like the use of the elliptical Sciences emblem: that seems a bit too much derived from the JJ Abrams version of Trek, rather than from the Prime timeline. It really should have been an ellipse inside a circle, not the other way around, but at least they *are* actually using the three established division emblems.

Overall, the design just looks too much like sportswear or a tracksuit. To be honest, you could take away the Starfleet arrowhead and substitute the Nike "Swoosh" and it wouldn't look far wrong.

I have only one other thought and that is this: we still haven't seen Jason Isaacs as Capt Lorcas or anything of the Discovery or her crew yet. Is it just possible that this segment with Burnham on the Shenzhou with Capt Georgiou is in the form of an introductory prologue, a bit like the Kelvin sequence at the start of the 2009 movie? Maybe we haven't actually seen the Discovery uniforms yet...?

 

The "Future Imperfect" badges combined rank and insignia.

 

From Trekyards video on the unifroms

 

This makes me want to do my own line up. If you kill the goofy TOS uniforms it fits. TWOK onward fits with what we are seeing.

 

Is it in anyway possible Discovery could yet be revealed as 10 years before Pike? In the 2240s? And the publicity is "Before Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise" because that sounds better as a tagline? It still works. 10 years before wherever Kirk is... a cadet presumably... Spock and the Enterprise as seen in "The Cage"... which is surely The Original Series, albeit by technicality?

 

That's... exactly what I was wondering. How certain is 2255?

 

That's an interesting idea. I would be curious as well.