Shawna Trpcic, the costume designer on Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett, discusses how the costumes in the Disney+ series captures the spirit of the original Star Wars trilogy.
A hardcore “Star Wars” fan, Trpcic first joined the franchise during season 2 of “The Mandalorian.”
In preparation for diving into the show’s spinoff “The Book of Boba Fett,” she studied the original making-of books that George Lucas created during production of the first movie, which provided templates for the original designers like production illustrator Ralph McQuarrie and costume designer John Mollo to follow. Then, she started working to create costumes that looked and felt like they belonged right back in 1977.
“I am very aware of the aesthetic that George Lucas had in 1977 and 1983, and I’m very aware of the technology that they did or didn’t have,” Trpcic says. “So one of the things I tried to do is use tools and resources that would have been available to them.”
For example, Trpcic would look for jackets from the ’40s, which would have been vintage when the first film was being shot. Unlike modern superhero costumes, which often print details on top of Euro jersey fabric, Trpcic and her team also focused on using real embroidery and fabric treatments for the vast majority of clothing characters wear over the course of the show. Many outfits relied on using raw silks and homespun cotton in order to convey the run-down, natural vibes of the desert planet Tatooine, where the majority of the story takes place.
“With ‘Book of Boba Fett,’ having things that seemed handwoven, or that had the texture and the weaves that you could almost picture being brought down on the loom and woven in between, it was important to me,” Trpcic says.
One set of characters these hand-woven materials were vital for were the nomadic Tusken Raiders, who wear long cloth robes and masks that hide their features. A mainstay of the franchise that first appeared all the way back in the original movie, the Tusken Raiders are hugely fleshed out in the miniseries, given a more clearly established culture and far greater prominence. While she for the most part stayed loyal to their original designs, Trpcic experimented with their details to help distinguish them from each other, adding things like longer dreadlocks for one prominent female warrior and charcoal and clay decorations on their masks that helped the viewer identify individual characters in the tribe that Boba Fett encounters.
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