Star Wars: The Acolyte Costume Designer Jennifer Bryan Details Creating High Republic Era Looks

Star Wars: The Acolyte is now three episodes deep on Disney+, and the new Lucasfilm series takes place 100 years before Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which means it’s officially set before any other live-action project in the franchise. Since the High Republic era has never been seen before, it left customer designer Jennifer Bryan some space to do new things with the characters’ looks. ComicBook recently had the chance to chat with Bryan about the show’s costumes, and we wondered how she approached going back in time considering how much things can change in 100 years, especially when it comes to fashion.

“No, I didn’t really have a style map overall because there were some things that I wasn’t privy to,” Bryan explained. “When you design it for a television series, your scripts, they’re kind of fed to you a little bit piecemeal. So I didn’t have an outline.”

“It’s important, especially something as unique as Star Wars that has such a long visual history in the story itself, and also with viewers because you’ve got YouTube and you’ve got that rewind button and you pull out the old VHS or whatever you watched it on, that digital reference is ther,” she added. 

“So when you’re doing a new chapter in something that has a very long history itself and a canon … the challenge is to forecast those things since I’m 100+ plus years behind, and kind of make a design relationship that it doesn’t look like that, because it doesn’t exist yet. But this thing that I’m doing has to harken as a predecessor to what can be Obi-Wan Kenobi or Darth Vader or something. Some little design thread needs to make the viewer, and especially the super fans, go ‘That’s where that came from.’ It’s like a design ping-pong.”

What Is The Acolyte About?

Set during The High Republic, Star Wars: The Acolyte delivers an investigation into a mysterious string of crimes, which pits a Jedi master against his former apprentice in a race to uncover the truth. The more that the pair learn about the situation, the darker their journey becomes, as they confront things that darker than either of them could have imagined.

The series stars Amandla Stenberg, Lee Jung-jae, Manny Jacinto, Dafne Keen, Charlie Barnett, Jodie Turner-Smith, Rebecca Henderson, Dean-Charles Chapman, Joonas Suotamo, and Carrie-Anne Moss.

Stay tuned for more from our interview with Jennifer Bryan. The first three episodes of Star Wars: The Acolyte are now streaming on Disney+ with the fourth episode scheduled to drop on Tuesday, June 18th.