Star Trek: Discovery Costume Designer on Updating Classics for Season 2

Designer @gershaphillips shares her inspiration behind #StarTrekDiscovery's season two costumes [...]

By Jamie Lovett

CBS has released a new video of Star Trek: Discovery costume designer Gersha Phillips and some of the show's cast discussing the costumes from the show's second season. In the short video on Twitter, Phillips discusses Discovery's take on the classic Starfleet uniforms worn by the Enterprise crew.

"Doing the Enterprise costumes was one of the really great challenges we got to do," Phillips says. "Our costume had a really good throwback to The Original Series with our collar the way it was, with the angle, and on the black, so it just had a really nice tip, and it does definitely echo that season."

In February, Phillips spoke to ComicBook.com and went into more depth about the Enterprise costume design process. "We did like three different versions of colors for that," she said. "When we were in that six-month prep, it felt like, we always had a date that we were trying to get in terms of a shoot date. There were many different ones, and each one of those dates, I was doing a different version of the three colors. And each time we did it, nobody liked them. There was a comment, the first time they thought it was too similar, it wasn't different enough, or it wasn't our own statement enough. And then the final one, we went with these sort of lighter colors. The idea is that they were sort of like metallic colors, and they just didn't look good.

"We actually got so far as we built them, we ordered the fabric in large quantities of yardage, and we camera tested them on the ship and the combination just did not work because the ship actually overrode the uniform. They weren't striking enough. The colors were just too insipid, I'm gonna say, actually. They just didn't have enough vibrancy, and the ship's very vibrant and has such a strong look to it that you needed something that sort of held its own in there. I think that's what's really great about our uniforms now is that they look fantastic on that ship, and it's a great complement. They complement each other, it's quite lovely. And even when the Enterprise uniforms were on, that was a nice complement."

The full video can be seen on StarTrek.com and includes discussion about the Red Angel suit, Spock's costumes, the Talosians, and more. What did you think of the costumes in Star Trek: Discovery's second season? Let us know in the comments.

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