How did the design for Seven of Nine�s suit pan out?

When we added Seven of Nine to Voyager it was due to some demographic issues. There was not a character that appealed to the eighteen to thirty-four year old male. So they determined that they would add a character, that she would be a Borg that would be de-Borged and slowly humanised, over the remainder of the series.

When Rick and Brannon spoke to me of this, First Contact had opened, it had done very well, the Borg were very interesting and, in fact, Alice Krige was very successful in that role as the Borg Queen. So, not wanting to recreate that, but wanting something in that world, they asked me to do first a Borg outfit that was less neuter and more specifically of a feminine gender.

After that she needed to get into a suit that really just needed to be a cat suit of some variety. But I think for both Rick and myself and for Brannon, it seemed too pandering, it needed to be more than just a cat suit.

We could all sort of walk around and go, �Well, yeah, it�s a � it�s a fit garment, but what do you see? You just see her silhouette.� Which was what I wanted to do, that was my notion, which was we find a way to contour her quite remarkable body. We did nothing to either minimise or extend her bodily shape, that is her from top to bottom, and it�s a remarkable figure.

The original design actually had a collar. It was a quite wonderful silver fabric that stretched in amazing ways. The corset, as it�s referred to, or the underpinning, became important, to have a structure that sat close to her body that allowed us to then get things to sit very close to her. The piece itself is made out of something called power net, which has got a lot of stretch to it, and then the ribs that you see are actually, court elastic, much lighter weight and much looser than bungee cord but in that same world. And so those are applied to this underpinning. And then that is a very tight fit and it takes a while to get on, it�s got a side zip.

You have to be very careful not to catch her skin as you�re doing it, so it takes a while just to get that underpinning on, and then the suit is contoured to her body.

When you see her in that uniform, one of the things that you get that is a sense of provocative, is that the bust is actually undercut. You go under rather than going from the high point down, it actually scoops under and then comes back to her ribcage. And that�s a series of hooks that the whole thing is rigged to this underpinning. And God bless her to go for four years wearing that thing.

There�s a kind of psychological discomfort that every single actor that wears a garment day after day after day develops. Nobody thinks, when they start a series, �Oh, I�m going to have to wear the same thing for seven years.� About the third year, they�re going, �Oh, I have to come in and put that same stupid on again. Why don�t I get some other outfit?� And from that comes a kind of, you either just swallow and say, �Well, this is what it is, and I�ll make the best of it�, or it becomes a lot of issues. It just depends on the personality of the actor.

Jeri is what I refer to as pressure sensitive. She can actually say to you, �It hurts right here.� And you can take the garment off and you can see that there�s a little knot of thread. It is the princess and the pea. She is the princess.