From The Archives: 10.12.2020
An article salvaged from the archives of my previous blog. First posted October 12, 2020.
It has come to my attention that I have not owned a Starfleet uniform since I moved to Boston, and that I ought to fix that. I intended to make myself a classic TOS duty uniform (the infamous mini-dress), because those are fairly simple and inexpensive. Then I got ideas, and my project ballooned, as most of my craft projects do.
Whenever you design a costume, the first thing you need to decide is whether you want it to be recognizable or accurate. Those are two very different outfits to make, and the choice generally comes down to work versus money. Almost any costume will involve some fairly generic pieces. The TOS men's duty uniforms, for instance, involve a pair of black highwater bell bottoms. (Yes, they look silly. They are actually patterned after old naval uniforms, so you aren't continually dragging your trouser cuffs across the wet deck.) You can make them if you're determined to be accurate, or you could go to Goodwill and just buy a pair of black pants, and that's probably good enough for people to get the idea.
For a lot of iconic costumes, there's a middle ground, which is buying a pattern. There is a commercially-available pattern for classic Starfleet uniforms, which I used the last time I did this. It's... okay. The design itself is accurate, specifically to the later tunics that had a princess seam down the side of the front with the slit, and a series of wedges radiating out from the insignia over the heart to the opposite side seam. The princess seams are necessary for construction. The slits in the front and back are not vents, but what are known as "kick pleats", like in the back of a coat, and because of the way those are shaped, they need to be inserted into a vertical seam.
The radiating wedges are not necessary for construction, and I have no idea why they did that. They're not really visible on screen on the regular duty dresses, where the seam lines are generally hidden in the pile of the velour. They are a visible design feature on Christine Chapel's medical uniform and Areel Shaw's dress uniform, which use a different fabric, but if you just want a regular duty uniform, feel free to just make a princess-seamed minidress and be done with it.
The men's tunics also have some weird seaming -- which you can ignore and just make yourself a long-sleeved t-shirt if you want -- but in that case there's method behind the madness, which is that it makes your extras look less sloppy. Regular sleeves, called "set-in" sleeves, are stitched into the garment along the armscye, which is the hole in the torso that your arm goes through. The top of the seam is supposed to go right across the cap of your shoulder, and both the location of the bottom edge and the overall diameter of the armscye affect how well the garment handles arm movement. If your shoulder seams are in the wrong place, or if the armscye is too tight/loose/big/small/far forward/far back, then it's obvious the fit is off and you need to do a lot more work to make it look nice on your new weekly batch of expendable redshirts. The men's tunics instead have eliminated the armscye completely by using raglan sleeves, closed on the underside with one continuous line of stitching that runs from the sleeve cuff down to the shirt hem, which can be adjusted at any point to alter the fit of the shirt without worrying about throwing off the alignment of anything else.
[It's hard to see this on screen, because the TOS costumes were made of incredibly cheap velour, which is one reason why making your own is inexpensive. The velour was so cheap that they were continually remaking the damn things, because they shrank every time they were cleaned. You can eliminate this in reproductions by using 4-way stretch velour, which doesn't re-size itself in the wash, and also lets you skip the zipper, because if it stretches you can yank it on over your head. Same for the men's shirts. If you make them out of a non-stretch fabric, the zipper on the men's tunic goes in the front left raglan seam, and the zipper on the ladies' dresses goes upside-down in the back right princess seam, with the stop at the top and the pull ending at the top of the kick pleat. Alternatively, you can put a zipper into the waist on the side of your non-dominant hand -- doesn't matter which that is, the purpose is just to expand the smallest part of the garment that might otherwise be too tight to get over your shoulders/bust.]
The ladies' dresses also mercifully have no armscye, because fuck I do not want to figure out set-in sleeves that actually run into the asymmetrical neckline on at least one side. Chapel's close with a seam along the top of the arm, although if you wanted to be particularly clever, it would actually be possible to cut one piece that constituted the side front-sleeve-side back (or, on the wedge side of the dress, the top right wedge-sleeve-side back) and close it with a long side seam as on the men's tunics.
The main issue I had with the commercial pattern back in the day is that it's very, very commercial. However accurate the design, the fit has been modified to be more in line with most modern patterns, with about a 9" difference between bust and waist and 9-10" between waist and a hipline 9" down from the waist. I defy you to stuff Lt Uhura into that. I have not had the opportunity to check the plus-size variants; plus sizing is not as standardized as the smaller sizes, for a variety of reasons, but I doubt they're any better.
While it's reasonably easy to make the dress to fit my shoulders/hips and take it in at the waist, the bust is a real problem. Most commercial patterns assume a largish B- or small C-cup, with a full bust about 2-2.5" above the underbust measurement. A pattern that says it's 36" around the bust assumes that you have a 33-34" rib cage (split in half, ~17" split across the back and the front under the bust), with an extra 2-2.5" of fullness across the top front. I'm around a 36" bust right now, but I'm a 30E. I could wear the garment as fitted in the pattern, but it would lay wrong -- the torso would be too wide, particularly in the back, which would make the side seams drift about an inch too far forward on either side, which in turn would rotate the underarm seam to be oriented slightly front instead of straight down, thereby fucking up the fit of the sleeve. And on top of that, even though the bust was technically large enough, it would be shaped wrong, and it would pull very obviously in weird directions, causing a lot of spontaneous wrinkling that literally points to the problem bits.
All in all, since I'm the only one who will be wearing the thing, it's probably easiest to just drape the pattern on myself.
Me being me, I also decided I needed a coat, which I think I made last time with a modified bathrobe pattern. Because, again, fuck set-in sleeves. I did alter the front panels to overlap, with one extending into a belt that wrapped around my waist, similar to the styling of the captain's wrap tunics. It fastens with magnets. One does not spoil space clothing with snaps.
It's probably worth noting here that the TOS duty uniforms are an unusual example of set-accurate being different than screen-accurate. Normally it's intentional, usually for FX reasons -- if you know anything about the state of special effects in the '80s, you can guess that the glow on the TRON bodysuits was added in post-production. (Not so for TRON: Legacy. Thanks to the introduction of electroluminescent tape, those costumes were practical effects. Technology marches on.) Although the division colors of Starfleet are commonly taken to be red, blue, and gold, the duty tunics on TOS were actually made in a pale apple green, in roughly the same colorway as Kirk's dress jacket. Some quirk of the cameras, lighting, and color correction in the processing lab made them appear harvest gold on screen, with some occasional telltale cool tones in the shadows.
The wrap tunics and dress jackets were evidently made of silk, which hahahahaha no. I do have several good sources of silk, but A) they're all online and I can't see the fabric in person, which bothers me no end, and B) they're all for the floaty 4.5-6 momme dance silks I use, and not the heavier weight fabric needed here. So now I've committed myself to ironing 4 yds x 58" of gold-shot-green imitation silk taffeta, because at this point it would physically hurt me to do this wrong. The main life goal of silk taffeta, whether real or artificial, is to wrinkle. It holds onto creases with the fervency of a Marine in dress blues. Both kinds of fibers are hydrophobic, so you can't use steam to relax the fabric as you can with cotton or linen, and the iron temperature you need to flatten polyester is suspiciously close to the temperature you need to melt polyester, which is a fun additional challenge. Do not attempt to work with taffeta until you've been grinding your crafting skills for a while, is what I'm saying.
Doing it right also means modifying the front panels to wrap, and moving the pockets to the side front seams. I am clearly a fool I am not the sort of fool who is willing to add to my misery with seven bound buttonholes and two welt pockets.
The pattern also specifies unlined, which doesn't thrill me in a coat, but since the lining only needs to be attached at the facings and edges I can probably get away with raglan sleeves. Judging from the photos in the reviews above, it's going to need a twill or flannel interlining to be a real coat, and some interfacing or horsehair in the collar, hem, and possibly sleeve cuffs to drape like the packet photo. I could use tarlatan, I suppose, but the rest of it is synthetic and at some point I'm going to want to wash this thing.
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