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Bob Blackman - Star Trek Costume Designer

Changing Uniforms
  Bob Blackman came in to make the Next Gen uniforms easier to wear.

I joined Star Trek – The Next Generation, the third season. I was principally brought in to redesign the uniforms. Over the first two seasons, the actors had developed, back problems and, and just a serious dislike for the fabric, which was Jumbo or Super Spandex.

At the beginning of that third season, you will see that the uniforms change structure during that time period, eventually ending up with that Eisenhoweresque mandarin collar, leaving the black yoke, leaving the angled colour panel on the front, but removing all of the piping that was on the yoke and all of that sort of thing, making them, essentially, more formal. Er, more dignity.

Some of that was necessary, because of Patrick, because of Americans and their sense of the English and the sound of an English accent. To make it more casual seemed inappropriate.

Back problems
  How did the costumes give the actors back problems?

Jumbo, or Super Spandex, whatever you want to call that heavier weight stretch, will stretch from side to side or top to bottom, depending on how you cut the garment.

The costume would dig into their shoulders, wearing them twelve hours or fifteen hours a day, it really just digs in and Patrick was having a lot of back problems at that point. The second thing is that Spandex is unforgiving, so if you have any sort of body issues, they are there. Thirdly, Spandex retains odour. So there is a certain part where if you’re wearing them for a long period of time, you can’t really clean all the smell out, and it becomes a little bit annoying. And it also retains the odour of the dry cleaning fluid. So, it’s a little bit, on a day-to-day basis, unpleasant.

The new uniforms
  What fabric did you move on to?

We moved on to wool gabardine. Any uniform is going to have something, and when you’re doing heroes, when you want the characters to look heroic, there are certain things that you must do to make them seem that way - Broader shoulder, narrow of hip, as vertical as possible, chest out, ready to go after evil.

The women of Next Gen
  How were the costumes different for the female crewmembers?

Dr.Crusher, though very attractive and quite beautiful, had to have a kind of formality that the empath didn’t, since she was civilian, so we could play around with her necklines, we could give her a little bit more sensuality, because she wasn’t officially a member of Star Fleet.

Of course, as the series went on, she then went into Star Fleet and she just went into a standard medical uniform.

Colour and Star Trek uniforms
  Is there an established rule for Star Trek uniforms through the ages?

When the original series came out, it was right at the beginning of colour television, and they wanted to make a point of colour television, so stronger colours were used just to emphasise that.William Mortice in his designs used a lot of modern pop fabrics, art fabrics, sort of psychedelics. There was a lot of very strong colour - very strong gold, the strong red, to that chartreuse - I mean, Lord, I think of that as strong colour! We could never got that colourful on any of our principal characters. We’ve set up a time line, and as we advance on that time line, I feel very obligated to keep a sort of historic record. So, as the uniforms have changed, over the three series that I’ve worked on, I’ve kept a colour palette - that sort of wine, burgundy, red, is for command, gold is for tactical and security, the sort of teal blue is medical and science. So I’ve kept those categories the same throughout.

Enterprise uniforms
  What are the uniforms like on Enterprise?

Now, working on Enterprise, which is a prequel to everything, we have gone back and changed the time line. So what was tactical and security, which is gold, now becomes command, and, tactical and security becomes the red colour.

On Enterprise, it’s a whole new look, I mean, the uniform is a new look, it’s got lots of stuff that we’ve never been able to do, and I’m really thrilled to be doing it and quite excited about it. I’ve started with a new image, but there are just kind of resonances of things that we then see develop greater in the future.

Voyager’s uniforms
  How did you try and make Voyager different?

Well, during the middle of Deep Space 9, we did First Contact, in which there was a uniform design change, so once that came out – I think it was in the second of third season of Deep Space 9 – once that happened and the feature was released we then integrated that design in towards a new issue for Deep Space 9, because the episodes would kind of line up.

When you go to Voyager, it’s a whiplash, because the Voyager uniform stayed like The Next Generation uniforms, but Deep Space 9 moved forward, so we had series in two different time frames, two different quadrants, they were in the same time frame, but they didn’t have the link to San Francisco, to Star Fleet, to get the information to change their uniforms.

Enterprise: creating the Sulaban
  How did you create a new costume for a race, like the Sulaban?

When we create a new character or a new species, if we are doing it in a pilot, then we have an enormous amount of time compared to when we do it episodically.

For Enterprise, on the Sulaban, who are the villain in this pilot, They have certain physical abilities, the ability to change shape, to break down, to slide under doors. So, thinking about that, I knew I wanted to do something that was all encompassing. In other words, there would be no difference between skin and clothing..

Ultimately, it was not an idea that Rick [Berman] and Brannon [Braga] really wanted to embrace, for many practical reasons. And some of those are about how to make the joins between hand and neck and body. But I was sort of gung ho to give that a shot. They put up with me for a while and then finally just said, ‘No, we’re not going to do that, so you have to – you have to think of another way.’

But what they did say is they came with a picture that they had of a head and some hands, that had a particular texture to them. And they gave that to both Michael Westmore and myself, and I was able to create that texture fairly accurately, with processing some fabrics in certain ways.

The concept for the characters was that they had the technology to be able to take this mimetic nature of their skin and develop materials and substances that had the same ability. So they could, essentially, think their clothing into other forms and think themselves into other forms. Using that as a springboard, then, having been able to come up with a texture that was close to what the skin type was going to be, it was a matter then of making sure that we could manufacture the fabric, we could manufacture the suits.

Enterprise uniforms
  What do the uniforms look like for the new series?

On Enterprise it moves closer to our present time, so we’re actually using a lot of natural fibre and a lot of very obvious openings, things we’ve never been able to do before. All closures had been secret, essentially, on Star Fleet, how do they get into that thing? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but now, we’ve got zippers, buttons, snaps, you know, it’s a whole new world for me.

The uniforms are cotton twill, they’re blue, not black and grey. It’s much more like a NASA flight suit than it is a Star Fleet uniform that we were familiar with. They really have an amazing sense of future - vital, heroic, much more casual.

The overused world - a sexiness to them, which does not necessarily mean, physical sex, but a kind of thing – a sensual quality in the ease in which they appear to be. They’re as uncomfortable as any of the other uniforms I have ever done. But because they can’t be loose and sloppy, they have to be close to the body. But it’s just how it is. It’s all about image, it’s not about, necessarily, the reality of the picture.

We have a female Vulcan character, and she has her away jackets made of some new fibre. The Sulaban definitely are made of stuff that’s not even manufactured on the market, it’s very weirdly organic and yet terribly slightly distastefully technically synthetic, it’s weird. I like it.

Seven of Nine
  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.

The Borg Queen
  Tell me about the Borg Queen, you’ve used it very recently.

The Borg Queen was originally designed by Deborah Everton for First Contact. It was designed for Alice Krige. Once the suit on – is on, it’s got those catches that are glued on. It’s a one-piece deal, there’s no saying, ‘Oh, I’ll just slip out of this right now ‘cos I have to go to the loo,’ not going to happen. It’s a lot of liquids through straws in a – in a minimal way. They take her out at lunch. I mean, we’re not complete barbarians.

Ferengi
  What input did you have on the Ferengi costume?

The Ferengi civilian outfits were totally mine. The military outfits, that we saw a lot of on The Next Generation, were, again, the creation of Derinder Wood. There were a couple of opportunities within The Next Generation in which they could be in civilian clothes. And I took full advantage … one was beachwear, and I really did terrible, loud, funny comic beachwear.

When we moved to Deep Space 9, and the Ferengi became civilians, Michael Pillar and Rick Berman said, ‘Well, you can just take that image and go with it, go.’ And so I did. I just took this idea of bad ‘fluence and bad taste, and how many things can you put together, and still have it look sort of visually interesting but not be so horrific that people think that you have no taste at all.

I think of it as Las Vegas really gone awry. Someone from the Mid-West who has a lot of money and has stuck a little Christian Laquoix and Gaultier and Vivienne Westwood together, and made their own idea of outfit.

Space sexy
  Exposing flesh in intersting alien ways

I’ve sort of got away with murder. [In False Prophets] those three girls that are hand maidens in the background, they’re exposed in ways that aren’t exposed at all. I’m just revealing parts of the body that we don’t usually look at, the underside of the breast rather than the top of the breast. The nipples are covered, rather, but the bottom of the breast is shown. And it seems terribly erotic and weirdly naughty but, in fact, it’s just as if you put a bikini on upside down, but we think of it as something else, because we never look at that area. So, it’s the – creating a new erogenous zone.

That actually follows the concepts of Bill Theiss [Star Trek’s original costume designer]. He was always thrilled to find a place that he could open up that would make our minds think that it was naughty but it really was just we had closed up another area and opened up this area … [with] cut-outs and weird sheer fabrics wrapped in gold cord and marabou. It’s an amazing thing that he was able to do and at the time that he did it.

The Dabo girls and all that Deep Space 9 stuff, I got away with a lot of stuff, sometimes because it was just a pan across them and then you went to the action and so the studio didn’t really pay as much attention to what was being panned as perhaps they ought to. Rick has always said to me, ‘You know, I was looking at this thing and how did you do that? How did you get that past?’

But, you know, we’re not dealing with America, we’re supposed to be dealing in other cultures that have other ideas about what is sexy and what isn’t. It’s no different than Victorian morals, in a way, you know, seeing an ankle at that point was shameless, you know. Bare shoulders during the day Would send someone away screaming in fits. And it’s just taking those ideas and shifting them around them again.

Babes in space?
  The first series had lots of babes in costumes but now the women dress quite demurely.

The notion of woman has changed since then. It’s not that women are no longer sexual images, but we have to also depict them as something more than that, because they are. You know, in the mid 60s to 70s, it was Barbarella, it was Barbie, it was Babe time. But we can’t in full honesty, and in modern thought process, do that.

We want to send out that people can be attractive and sensual, and even sexual, but they can also have a brain and they can succeed. It’s the Seven of Nine image. We had this very erotic physical form that walks around spouting more information, more techno-babble than anybody else on the series, who is the most reserved, in that way, in the physical way, and yet we get this interesting dichotomy of image versus content. And I think it makes for a richer image, I think it makes for a better story line, and I think we can also sort of hold our heads up and say we’re not just pandering her body, we’re actually trying to play around with images. One might say, you’re just justifying, sex … perhaps I am.

Definitely beyond Baywatch, oh God. It’s the greatest fear, that that’s what you’re turning things into.

Klingons
  The Klingon costumes have changed before, and they will again for Enterprise.

The Klingons were not of my origin, they were originated by Robert Fletcher for the Star Trek movies. Ee still use those original costumes, thirty years later,they were so brilliantly constructed and conceived.

For the new series we are going back four hundred years in time, so we have these more kind of Nordic, kind of Vikingesque, if you will, Klingons - Fur and leather and just chewed up stuff.

What I had to do was to take, as I’ve done with the uniforms, which is to take the existing imagery and then flip backwards and just pull away. So the silhouette remains the same. There are certain things that remain the same. The use of metal, the use of fur, the use of leather, but it’s just in a more primitive way.

During the series, I took those Klingon images and made civilian ones, which we had never seen, but it was really based on that, initial concept of Bob Fletcher’s.

The Borg
  Evolving the Borg costumes

The Borg started with Derinder Wood, and she came up with a jump suit, out of a fabric called popcorn spandex, it’s pebbly. She had so little time to do it, it’s amazing how wonderfully they turned out, those original Borg.

She then went to a lot of special effects houses, and found moulds and things, and they made rubber pieces that had the male side of velcro embedded in them, and then using a kind of split cable, she would just plant them on - not unlike a children’s felt board, you would stick these items on them, and then you would run the cords between them, and when they first appeared on The Next Generation, in the second season, that’s how they were done.

The first time they used them, I think it took two hours per Borg, to get them dressed, because they were figuring it out, getting these sort of cod pieces on, getting all of these shoulder pieces, the chest pieces, and all the bits that went between them. So, I then got that as the legacy, and I had to slowly but surely figure out ways to condense the imagery, and make them get more sophisticated along the way.

Yhe suits originally were a very dark olive colour, and the plant-ons were black with metallic highlights and bits on them. I changed the suits to black, so that the spaces in between became visually less, so it looked like it was more organic rather than a suit with things stuck on it. And then, bit by bit, I started colouring it and rusting them out. Eventually we made them into more unit-ised suits. There were still things that had to be planted on, but they became more worn, so they were quicker to get in and out of.

Then, First Contact came along and Deborah Everton took that image, that history, and evolved it into a two piece suit, so that people could get in and out, and they became much more monsteresque. Part of the problems was doing stunts in them when they were plant-ons - bits would be flying.

The Hirogen
  Making seven foot aliens was quite a challenge. Making them smaller was an even bigger one.

The Hirogen were the biggest challenge for me. They were originally seven foot men in these very big rubber suits. We had little time to do them. It became very apparent to me that there would be no movement, they couldn’t actually do anything once it was put together, we didn’t have the capability, time-wise, to articulate them. Quickly, we turned them into rubber suits rather than plastic suits. It was harrowing every inch of the way, I have to say, because the clock was ticking and there was no out, you had to do it.The first run of them, which was a seven show arc, and in that arc we changed the notion from seven foot actors, for a couple of reasons. We couldn’t find actors that were good enough, at seven foot, and, two, it became a shooting issue, how to get everybody in frame when you needed everybody in frame.

We backed down to six four actors, six two actors, six foot actors, and we then had to really find ways to adjust the garments, to shrink huge sizes down to small sizes and keep the integrity of the look. As we went into the next season, we were able to re-cast them in a lighter weight material, so that they were easier to move around in.

Trials and Tribble-ations
  Recreating uniforms for the DS9 crew to wear for their visit to the Original Series.

The uniforms that we did for The Trouble with Tribbles were fun to do because it became a real technical problem of how to find fabric that no longer exists that will photograph as if it is the same from the original series so that when they drop them in optically, and they’re standing next to Bill Shatner, the suits look the same. I was in a big sweat about it.

Eventually, they [the post production people] just said ‘we’ll just dial it’ - you know, we’ll fix it for you.

We had a couple of old uniforms, so we could actually draft patterns off of them and then make them. I think it was the most fun that the DS9 cast had. They loved it, they loved getting in that 60s stuff and messing around.