Sleek, Modern, and Iconic
How the Space Force Got Its
Out-Of-This-World Uniform
Among many seemingly mundane decisions awaiting the new Space Force was simply how to dress its personnel. But in September 2021 when the decision was announced, public reaction was, shall we say, mixed. A particular focus of attention was the cut of the new service dress coat, the buttoned, slanted closure of which reminded some commentators of the burgundy uniform worn by Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, or the dark blue uniforms worn on the reboot of Battlestar Galactica.
So . . . . . . . . . did the Space Force steal its uniform from the silver screen?
Well . . . . . . . . . no. The military is a collection of human beings, each with duties and objectives, tastes and talents, and sure, even literary preferences. But as you might imagine, outfitting a whole new service branch has profound cultural, financial, and practical ramifications. It’s not something to be taken lightly, and it’s not something some fanboy politico could do on a whim. In this case, it required a collaboration between the Air Force Uniform Office, the U.S. Space Force Office of the Chief of Space Operations, and the Defense Logistics Agency Troop Support Clothing and Textiles—the group in charge of outfitting “every soldier, sailor, airman and Marine around the world, from their first day of service in boot camp, to camouflage uniforms worn on the battlefield, to service dress uniforms.”
Some decisions were easier than others. For most everyday purposes, the same camouflaged fatigues worn by the Air Force and Army would suffice. After all, even the new Space Force’s two astronauts would spend most of their time on the ground, and even if most earthbound guardians would never need to hide in the woods, it made no economic sense to develop a unique operational uniform for a service branch smaller than most corporations. Nor was it necessary. A military uniform isn’t just a piece of clothing, but all the accessories and insignia worn with it. Air Force camouflage ABUs and intra-service OCPs were durable, practical and readily available, and more fit to Space Force service than gas-station coveralls. They fit the bill.
But as the first new U.S. military branch since the Air Force was created in 1947, the Space Force does need to foster its own traditions and culture. One important way of doing that is with a unique service dress uniform for wear in the office, barracks and other nonfield duties, and especially for ceremonial occasions.
In the words of Tracy Roan, Chief of the Air Force Uniform Office responsible for the design, the mandate was to create a service uniform that was “sleek, modern, and iconic.” Doing that took a little more than doodling costumes from the movies.
In an interview for this article, Roan and her Pentagon counterpart, Space Force Change Management Team analyst Cathy Lovelady, said that aside from stylistic and cultural considerations, a military uniform must first be manufacturable, affordable to supply to thousands of personnel, comfortable, durable and fit to purpose.
So how did they go about it?
Half the staff of the Uniform Office was assigned to brainstorm, looking for inspiration to historical military and commercial aviation uniforms, drawing from their own interests, and creating anew from their imaginations. One hundred fifty candidate “sleek, modern, iconic” designs were then workshopped with various mixed-rank focus groups. Roan and Lovelady say that because the new branch is so small (originally about nine thousand people transferred from the Air Force) it was practical to incorporate more feedback from service members than in the design of probably any other uniform in history.
A key part of these initial steps was a first -of-its-kind “female first” approach. Why? Because today, 20 percent of Air Force personnel are women, and women are more variable in proportions than men. A military uniform needs to be just that, uniform enough to fit everyone well without unsightly or unserviceable gaps, binding, or anatomically inconvenient pockets or closures. A design that fits the diversity of women will easily fit men too, while the reverse—as the focus groups were quick to point out—is not true. NASA, are your space suit designers listening?
The initial ideas were whittled down to five major options, then after more focus groups and consultations, to the one which, as Roan puts it, “had pretty much been everyone’s first or second choice.” Prototypes were made, tried out, reviewed, refined, showed off to the press, taken on a roadshow to installations across the country, and refined some more. In response to service personnel feedback, a stripe was added to the retailored pants, the jacket was lengthened, the number of interior buttons was reduced, and pockets were restyled and added, including an accessible inner jacket pocket.
The final design features a midnight blue jacket with a lapel-less collar bearing mirror-silver “U.S.” insignia, a closure of six prominent buttons representing the six service branches, and for commissioned officers, platinum sleeve braids. The jacket is worn with a matching midnight blue necktie, a platinum shirt, dark gray pants, and black shoes.
The jacket’s asymmetrical cut and closure give it a distinctive style that recalls both the military frock coats of the Napoleonic era and the asymmetrical “swish” associated with rocketry in military emblems as far back as World War II. It makes sense, in context, and if it reminds some of the costumery of Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica, there are two obvious reasons that might be the case. First, most Americans are more familiar with movies than with military history. Second, the twentieth-century peak of mass-production consumerism arguably created something of a stylistic desert from which we are only now emerging. That is to say, these jackets do not resemble each other nearly so much as they stand apart from the mundane cut of the men’s suits and uniforms common throughout the latter twentieth century.
Tail fins notwithstanding, the rise of industrial mass production brought with it a shift away from the ornate craftsmanship of some earlier eras toward a modern aesthetic of simple parts stamped out by the million. It gave us Brutalist architecture, injection-molded furniture, tract housing, wall-to-wall carpet, and cheap clothing made on assembly lines rather than by tailors. This is not to say the century was without style or innovation, but in subtle ways and without realizing why, we in the West today have had our tastes strongly influenced by the stripped-down, flat-pack design aesthetic wrought by mass production. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just part of who we are and when we are living.
But style wasn’t always this way, and as advancing technology restores a measure of control and customization back into production without sacrificing all the economies of massive scale, it’s becoming less so again. Theatrical costumes, produced in small lots, have always been free from the restraints imposed by the assembly line. Increasingly today, so are the factories that cloth armies, both figuratively and literally.
Furthermore, those who see Battlestar Galactica in the new Space Force jacket may not be aware that the same Napoleonic era aesthetic never quite died out. It still survives in the Air Force Cadet uniform, in the uniforms of many marching bands, and in some places, those of valets and other long-standing uniformed civilian occupations. Indeed, its clearly more realistic to say that in this regard, science fiction has long imitated life.
Star Trek is a case in point. For the original series, costumes were created by William Ware Theiss, who’d spent four years in the U.S. Navy and witnessed hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll before moving to Hollywood. Charged with creating a futuristic military look on a shoestring 1960s TV production budget, he bloused the trousers over the boots to recall the look of naval uniforms of his day, but used synthetic fabrics that were cheap, modern-looking, and easy to keep clean, even if they reminded some of pajamas.
This changed with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Star Trek had appeared in the technicolor sixties, just as color television was becoming widespread, on a network that used a polychromatic peacock’s tail as its logo over the catch phrase “and now in living color.” Some, including director Robert Wise, thought its color scheme a bit overdone. Theiss being otherwise committed, costume designer Robert Fletcher was brought in with a mandate to tone down the uniforms and let the actors be seen. His design left little but formfitting beltless catsuits, and though the results were arguably more uniform, many found them distractedly bland and unflattering.
Nicholas Meyer, who came aboard to direct The Wrath of Khan, gave Fletcher new—and most would argue better—marching orders. Gene Roddenberry had sold the original series as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” but Meyer latched on to another cultural prototype—Horatio Hornblower, and the comparison is more than apt.
For those who don’t know, the Hornblower books were written in the 1930s and ’40s by C. S. Forester, who also wrote The African Queen and is regarded as the father of the naval historical novel. Forester got the idea after reading an old copy of the Royal Navy’s magazine Naval Chronicle, from the early nineteenth century. At that time, long-distance communication was limited to the speed of sail, and it could take months for orders or news of political developments (like the start or end of hostilities) to travel from one end of the British Empire to the other. As a result, sea captains were given extraordinary latitude and so carried extraordinary responsibility, and Forester saw in this fertile ground for spinning a gripping adventure.
So did Gene Roddenberry. It’s no coincidence that on Star Trek, subspace communication is always out of service, filled with static, or slightly too slow to save the day—it’s more dramatic that way. It’s also revealing that in the original Star Trek pilot (later re-cut into the episode, “The Menagerie”) and in early episodes, Spock sometimes shouts from his bridge station as if into an old-style ship’s speaking tube, and the captain is seen chatting over drinks with the intercom on so he can worry over every blip of the ship’s goings-on. Roddenbery’s Enterprise is a U-boat in space, her captain as isolated and weighed down by responsibility as Sir George Cockburn in the War of 1812.
Roddenberry, who wrote science fiction to escape the ire of network censorship, emulated the naval adventure stories of his youth—which were inspired by the Hornblower books. Screenwriter David Gerrold, in his 1973 book The World of Star Trek, described the series as “Horatio Hornblower in space,” and Meyer (who had never seen Star Trek before he was asked to direct it) has always described it in exactly those words. It’s no surprise then that Fletcher, with Meyer at the helm, was now free to recostume Starfleet in a more recognizably naval mold.
To all three men, Horatio Hornblower could not have failed to recall images of Gregory Peck, who in promotional art for the 1951 film Captain Horatio Hornblower, stands en garde and saber drawn beside Virginia Mayo, his Napoleonic war–era captain’s frock open and disheveled, exposing the white lining inside. Never has a wardrobe choice said more in a glance about a character and his story, and the appeal of the look for what was essentially going to be Moby Dick in space could not have been more obvious.
Like the naval uniforms that inspired it (or a modern trench coat, inspired by the same source), Fletcher’s new Starfleet uniform featured a double-breasted front that could be fastened on both sides to (perhaps unnecessarily in Starfleet’s case) securely seal out the wind, or be left partially open to regulate ventilation, allowing those engaged in daring deeds to both stay cool and look cool at the same time. Of course to “futurize” the design, Fletcher replaced the traditionally large cast metal buttons with hidden hooks more common to girdles, and swept the left breast out at the top, emulating the swoop of the Starfleet insignia and further securing it by a clasp to a modified epaulet.
This is a perfect example of how movie costumes and military uniforms converge and diverge around their similar, but differing requirements. Modern zippered closures only appeared in 1914 and quickly became a central part of the minimalist twentieth-century fashion aesthetic. Buttons therefore became old-fashioned, hidden fasteners “modern.” So Captain Kirk got off-the-shelf, mass-produced clasps that were easily sewn into a hidden jacket closure that appeared “futuristic” but retained the flexibility and cut of a nineteenth-century frock coat. The Space Force jacket is a more practical “futuristic” take on the same historic antecedents, only at the scale of production required to outfit the military—long-wearing buttons, easy, practical and deeply recalling military tradition, are cheap to mass produce.
Military uniforms are informed by history for cultural reasons. Costumes borrow from history for authenticity. Sometimes, converging objectives give similar results, like a swooping closure for a jacket associated with rocketry. Sometimes, diverging requirements lead to different solutions—cheap “pajama” synthetics versus comfortable, long-wearing cotton, tiny clasps versus sturdy buttons.
The Space Force didn’t steal their uniform from sci-fi, but if it supplied a kernel of inspiration, is that really such a bad thing? The best science fiction is not only entertaining, it’s aspirational. Battlestar Galactica was about perseverance and hope under threat of extermination. Star Trek was about not only defense and projection of power, but the pursuit of peace and discovery for its own sake. Neither is exactly well grounded in reality, yet each in its own way speaks to the very best of humanity. We can only hope that in the conflicts to come, our defenders will aspire to similarly high ideals.