Via Vanityfair.com:
Michael Kaplan, the costume designer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, began his career in the mid-1970s working for Bob Mackie, Hollywood’s glitziest designer, on The Sonny and Cher Show. (His initial task: “metallicizing” a pair of Cher’s shoes to match one of Mackie’s gowns.) Kaplan made the leap to film with Ridley Scott’s visionary Blade Runner (1982). He has since designed costumes for Flashdance, Se7en, Fight Club, Armageddon, I Am Legend, and J.J. Abrams’s two rebooted Star Trek movies.
Kaplan and I recently spoke about his work for Abrams on The Force Awakens, including the influences of both Apple and the Third Reich on the fashions of the resurgent Empire, along with the question of just how crazy or not he could get with Princess Leia’s and Han Solo’s outfits.
Read Vanity Fair’s June 2015 cover story on The Force Awakens and see Annie Leibovitz’s exclusive cast photos.
Bruce Handy: It’s interesting that the costume designer for Blade Runner is now working on a Star Wars movie, because those are the two movies, along with The Road Warrior, that really defined the lived-in, retro-future look that has been such a staple in science fiction for the last 40 years. Did you draw much on your Blade Runner experience for The Force Awakens?
Michael Kaplan: I learned a lot on Blade Runner, just my love of grit and texture and things being overly aged. The reason I got the job on Blade Runner was they were meeting with a lot of people, and a lot of people, when they heard it was futuristic, were kind of bringing in, like, Mylar space-suit sketches and things like that, and I think I was the only one who read the script and felt that it should have an old Sam Spade, old gumshoe kind of feeling. When I said that, it kind of hit a note and I got the job.
I learned from Ridley how great it is to re-use things and make new things out of things that already exist in a way, where you’re kind of not even recognizing the object that you started with. I like digging around in thrift shops and I don’t know if that’s a signature but it’s something that I’ve done a lot in my work. Or maybe it’s just the films that I’ve been on that have required that.
How did that play out on The Force Awakens?
We re-used many things, like taking old military gas masks and tubes and hoses and kind of applying them, which we did on Blade Runner, which I’ve always liked to do when I can.
Did you actually re-use any old Star Wars costumes? Are there like racks and racks of old stormtrooper uniforms in some warehouse up at Lucas Ranch?
We didn’t use anything, but I went up to George Lucas’s archives—huge building—and just spent a day going through sketches and looking just to get the tone of the movie, you know, in my guts and veins so that when I went to London I felt equipped and inspired, which I certainly did.
But the old stormtroopers uniforms would not be usable. Audiences of today have become so sophisticated that a lot of things you could get away with in the past, you can’t anymore. So the new uniforms are much heavier. Also, the action in the film required them to not be “VacuFormed” [like the old uniforms] as those all broke and cracked. These new ones are much more heavy-duty, but they are redesigned, too, they’re not the same stormtroopers.
How did you tweak them?
Everything was a conversation with J.J., of course. He wanted to hold on to the uniqueness and not get too far away from the stormtroopers, keep that iconic look, but still have 30 years of difference. I mean, it would be a little odd to have the same stormtroopers this much later when Leia and Han are so much older.
Well, right. The U.S. military isn’t wearing the same things they were wearing in the 70s, either.
Fashion changes and requirements change.
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