Ah, so it is. It was hard to see on my phone, but I see it now.
I really don't like the Admiral's Uniform
I agree with almost everything they say here, which is a rare thing to happen for me lol
I think the Trekyards guys have missed a few things; I’m not sure I entirely agree with their analysis.
The Commodore is wearing her rank bar on what is otherwise a plain standard uniform. Given that Adm. Clancy is C-in-C, and can likely wear whatever she chooses, I suspect that her “uniform” is a one-off that is specific to her and is not necessarily representative of what other flag officers would be wearing during this period.
That said, it’s worth picking apart some of the design cues as there’s quite a lot going on here:
The black side panels on Clancy’s grey tunic are reminiscent of the TNG uniforms; perhaps more importantly, given her position, there’s also an echo of the formal uniform that Adm. Kirk was wearing when we first see him in TMP. The shoulder panels that are separated with a notch that leads up to the collar, rather than being one continuous yoke, also echoes the flashback era uniform from the time before Picard’s resignation.
In fact, if you look at the uniforms generally, they have very strong links to the preceding eras:
The coloured yoke with deep sleeve points on the “current” uniforms echoes the flashback era uniforms (which presumably directly preceded these “current” uniforms from the time period of Picard’s retirement); the very plain, square-edged collar, worn over the plain black undershirt is not the same as the flashback uniforms but it does echo their collars, which have a plain black band above a colored collar strip.
The current rank pip placement echoes both the AGT / Endgame alternative future uniforms and the previous TNG-era dress uniforms. It’s also not that dissimilar to where the rank bars on the shoulder straps of the TWOK uniforms were worn.
The flashback era uniforms from around twenty years previous to the show have a similar feel to the early-TNG jumpsuits, almost like Starfleet got to the end of the Dominion War period and consciously went back to something that had a feel of a much more positive time in their history. The details may be different (colored shoulder, black body rather than the other way around) but to me the overall “feel” if these costumes is very much early TNG.
Those TNG S1/S2 spandex jumpsuits may have only lasted a couple of years on TV for us the viewers but in the backstory we know that they go back quite some time to at least the period when Picard was commanding the USS Stargazer.
Equally, although it has added gold and a few other features, Picard’s admiral uniform is actually not radically different from the standard uniforms of that period — so maybe it’s not such a leap that, for the next iteration of their uniforms, Starfleet subsequently opted to drop the flag officer distinctions entirely and simply put the updated rank bars on completely standard uniforms, as they had done in the past (c.f. senior officers in TOS).
On that note, I have to say that I like the new, updated versions of the rank bars. The trapezoidal shape is a clever echo of the design features of the uniform itself. It makes the bars much more distinctive as a stand-alone feature and I think they are better for it.
I also like the fact that they have gone for a minimal approach with just one flag officer rank bar in the standard rank position, instead of multiple bars on both collars and both sleeve cuffs. I’m still trying to find absolute confirmation of this but everything I can see from reviewing lots of HD freeze-frames and screen grabs suggests that the rank bars use the same mix of polished silver with satin bronze-grey background as the finish on the new combadges, which I think is a very nice design touch.
I have to admit that I started out being rather underwhelmed by the new Starfleet uniforms and really wasn’t at all convinced about the designs or what the costume designers were trying to achieve when we saw the first few images. Now that I have seen the real things on-screen in the episodes, I think I’m beginning to understand what they had in mind and these new Starfleet uniforms are very much starting to grow on me. For sure, it’s not what I would have done but I was ready to dislike them quite a lot and I’m finding that, much to my surprise, I don’t!
