And Women Wore Less - Starfleet Uniforms Part 1: 2250s - early 2270s
It’s impossible to have a proper discussion about the outfits worn by the female characters of Star Trek without talking about the costume worn the most frequently, by the most characters - the Starfleet uniform.
Why then, have I left it until the fifth week? Well, mostly it was because I wanted to get my head around this whole, writing articles about Star Trek thing, but it also didn’t feel right to begin our discussion of the iconic costume by talking about it in the middle of its life cycle.
And by that I mean, I wanted to talk about it in its earliest incarnation, and then work my way through each series and discuss how it evolved over time. So this post will be the first of many parts - if you have any thoughts on later uniforms then send them my way, for me to include in coming weeks, but maybe try to keep the discussion this week focused on the uniforms I’ve mentioned.
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So to kick off this huge, monster of a topic, I’m going to begin with something you may or may not have been expecting -
The Starfleet uniform worn in ‘The Cage’.
As the costumes used in the pilot, this is actually the first Starfleet uniform we see. And to be honest, after recently rewatching ‘The Menagerie’ I was surprised by how much I liked it. I never had particularly fond memories of it, too much mustard and apricot and pastel blue. But upon seeing it again, years later, I was struck by how much it actually looks like a uniform people on starships in the future might wear.
And, let’s be honest, part of that comes down to the fact that the uniforms are unisex. Other than the cute little turtle-neck or cowl or whatever that thing is the women have on the neck of their tunics, there’s no real difference between what they wear and what the men wear.
Which means of course, that the women also get to wear pants! Hallelujah!
The material actually looks sturdy enough to withstand the robust life of a Starfleet officer (which is more than we can say for the later uniforms, given how a slight breeze would practically tear Captain Kirk’s shirt off his chest).
And - my favourite part - they have neat silvery grey jackets that they wear while part of landing parties! Even better, they too look sturdy and weather-proof, and like the kind of thing you should be given to wear while exploring a potentially hostile alien planet. (According to Memory Alpha these are called excursion jackets).
Even more exciting, they have a utility harness underneath these jackets to hold their phaser and communicator. It seems like this is the most well thought out, practical Starfleet uniform we ever see (except maybe Enterprise, but we’ll get to that in a few weeks!).
And the best part is, the women wore all of this too.
But of course, these uniforms were only seen a few times in the series, as they were replaced by the much more recognisable uniforms worn by the crew of the Enterprise for the majority of the show.
Apparently the red replaced the peach because it looked too similar to the gold on screen (despite the fact that the fabric that looked peach was actually more of a gold colour), which makes sense because it totally does.
Also, in case you didn’t know, the command gold we’re so familiar with was actually a lime green colour! It just looked gold on screen - which is also why Kirk’s Captain tunic variation looked green, the fabric they used for that tunic was different to the velour they used for the rest of the uniforms.
Another amusing fact is that the satin velour used in the uniforms shrank when washed, which is why their shirts always looked a bit short - they replaced the velour with a double-knit fabric in the third season.
But I’m sure what you’re really dying to talk about is the iconic uniform worn by the women.
Consisting of a dress with long sleeves and a very short skirt, worn over matching high cut shorts with black pantyhose and boots. Unlike the male uniforms, the female uniforms also had a large open collar - which was black on most uniforms, but the same colour as the tunic on others (most notably Nurse Chapel’s).
There are a few things I think need to be said about these uniforms.
The first of which is that they - like every other outfit worn by every character in TOS - were designed by William Ware Theiss, who apparently has a theory named after him -
The “Theiss Titillation Theory"—which claims that “the degree to which a costume is considered sexy is directly proportional to how accident-prone it appears to be"—is named after him.A key example of this idea in practice is the female android costume in the Star Trek episode “What Are Little Girls Made Of?" in which the revealing top portion consists only of two crossing straps of material that connect in one piece to trousers, and—Theiss’s personal favorite—the gown featured in the episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?": a backless dress in which the front of the dress was held up by the weight of the train which fell over the shoulder to the floor. [x]
Given the costumes he created (and the fact that he worked on the entire show, and then later TNG) I’m not at all surprised at the attitude of people involved in the making of the show…
Robert H. Justman associate and later co-producer of TOS -
‘Bill Theiss was a most interesting person, one of the most interesting persons I’ve ever met. He was quite talented but he resisted coming up with a final design, because for what ever reason it was it was like pulling teeth, but he was very creative.
[For the original series] I used to go to most every fitting with Gene to make our comments and make our changes which often consisted of making sure that there was less material on the girl than she had beginning with. So that’s how the wardrobe came about.
Gene got a chance to get his hands on the person who was wearing the outfit, but there was no doubt about it that we went for skin exposure, we wanted to get a bigger audience and hopefully that would help us. Certainly the guest stars were usually beautiful and definitely hardly clothed. And that was all right by Gene.
I think the women liked wearing very little. I think it got them a lot of attention. I remember one actress who had a very very skimpy outfit and we all went to lunch after the first fitting and she put on a bath robe and we walked over to the cafeteria at Paramount, she removed her bathrobe and walked in in her costume which caused quite a stir and then dead silence. All eyes were on her.’ [x]
Majel Barrett -
‘It was just part of the fun, it really was, and he got very fancy… Gene loved to have beautiful women around and he loved to have beautiful women with no clothes, or as few clothes as he could possibly put them in, and Bill accommodated him in every way he could.’ [x]
But then, interestingly, in another interview, this is what she had to say -
‘Gene had wanted very much to show women in a more positive point of view, and women that were stronger, because he said they exist in the world - but he kind of pulled back a little and said ”Okay, they are pretty things”, and that’s why we end up with little short skirts and big bouffant hairdos and, you know, it was a very sexist thing to do, but he did it.’ [x]
Hmmm, I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Because the other thing we need to consider, is that it was a very different time, when the original show was being made.
The 60s was the decade in which the bikini came into fashion. Beehive hairdos were popular, and in 1964 designer Mary Quant introduced the mini-skirt, which was eventually worn by nearly every stylish young woman in the western world.
So while now we look back on the uniforms as slightly risque at best and sexist at worst, we need to keep in mind the context in which the show was created.
Nichelle Nichols was asked in an interview what she thought of her costume, because it was very revealing, her reply was -
‘So? I was wearing them on the street. What’s wrong with wearing them in the air? I wore ‘em on airplanes. It was the era of the miniskirt. Everybody wore miniskirts.
It amazes me that people still make some remark about ‘the revealing’. They revealed nothing. I had long black stockings on and boots up to my knees and the skirts and panties on and a skirt that gave you freedom to move in, - so what?
It amazes me because everything is more revealing today on the street than those costumes.’
And as Robert Blackman, designer from halfway through TNG through DS9, Voyager, Enterprise and the TNG movies, says -
‘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.’
I don’t know about you, but for me doing the research into this has been illuminating. It’s so easy, as a modern day viewer, to look at those old uniforms and immediately judge them as sexist. But to do so is to ignore the fashion trends of the time, which were reflected back at us from the fictional future of Star Trek.
No, they’re not practical uniforms in the same way that those in ‘The Cage’ were. (Well, unless you count the belt Uhura got to wear while going on away missions.)
But neither is the uniform worn by Kirk or Spock or the rest of the men of Starfleet. And the fact is, the uniform didn’t impede Uhura from being an active member of the crew - or even from fighting, when the situation called for it.
It’d also be remiss of me to point out that the only time we see her using her technical skills, when rewiring the communications system in ‘Who Mourns for Adonais?’, she’s given a technician’s jumpsuit the same as any other member of the crew.
As Blackman pointed out, if they’d created something like that now - without it being a direct replica or some sort of parody - then I’d have serious issues with it, but perhaps it is too much to condemn something created almost five decades ago, in a time so different from our own…
Then again, if I can scoff at the soft focus and condescending attitude of some of the male characters, then perhaps it’s not too much. All I do know is that I’m grateful they were put in uniforms at all, which is more than I can say for some of the characters in later Trek.
What are your thoughts on the TOS Starfleet uniform? Unforgivably sexist? Or just a product of the times?
chequerootlurks
