![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
One of my favorite superficial enjoyments of watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was when we got to see crew members wear outfits other than their uniforms. Not that the uniforms themselves weren't sexy—they were! all long and slimming and with that zipper down the front that would creep lower to expose more neck and chest as temperatures and stress levels rose... *cough* However, we are talking today about the appeal of clothes that differ from the regular uniforms, especially when those clothes only make rare appearances.
Because what happens is you see each crew member week after week in the same outfit, so that it becomes ingrained in your experience of them and your understanding of them, seems to be a part of their identity, their performance, as much a physical trait as their height and hair color, until you don't notice the uniform anymore—and then suddenly, at a party or in a holosuite or in a flashback, they're dressed up in something else, and even watching it 15 or 20 years later when some of the fashions are just embarrassing, it's electrifying.
Tomboy Kira wearing a dress! Captain Sisko in a loose casual shirt, cooking beets! O'Brien in a wetsuit, fresh from his latest kayaking accident! And it gets so much more diverse: There are variants when characters go on leave, lounge around at home, dress for special occasions, put on traditional garb from their cultures/planets, visit holosuites, travel forward or back in time, and go undercover; when we see flashbacks and flash-forwards; and when we enjoy peeks into AUs and mirror universes. And it can get wonderfully deep: The joy and fascination can be about skin and sex appeal, humor, seeing a different side of a familiar character, learning more about a culture or a universe, learning more about a character's past or future, delighting in the characters (or the actors) acting as other characters, mixing genres, or feeling pride when far-away and/or alien fictional characters want to dress like us. (Well, I say "us" as someone who identifies with many of the cultures the show paid homage to.) And more.
All this isn't unique to DS9, of course. I've experienced the same with the other Treks, and Stargate: Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica, and basically any show or movie where the characters have a typical outfit, or even a typical way of dressing, that gets occasionally interrupted. (And then there's a show like Community, which is made of dress-up, yet somehow by putting its characters in wildly new getups basically every other week it manages to retain the thrill. But that is a subject for another time.)
So that is the text block. What I'd like to do in the rest of this post is talk about how DS9 explored different kinds of out-of-uniform dress-up, illustrated with ~80 lovely screen shots, and touch on what I love about them and why.
( First, let's establish our baseline. )
Written for the "dressup" square on my Bingo card.
Because what happens is you see each crew member week after week in the same outfit, so that it becomes ingrained in your experience of them and your understanding of them, seems to be a part of their identity, their performance, as much a physical trait as their height and hair color, until you don't notice the uniform anymore—and then suddenly, at a party or in a holosuite or in a flashback, they're dressed up in something else, and even watching it 15 or 20 years later when some of the fashions are just embarrassing, it's electrifying.
Tomboy Kira wearing a dress! Captain Sisko in a loose casual shirt, cooking beets! O'Brien in a wetsuit, fresh from his latest kayaking accident! And it gets so much more diverse: There are variants when characters go on leave, lounge around at home, dress for special occasions, put on traditional garb from their cultures/planets, visit holosuites, travel forward or back in time, and go undercover; when we see flashbacks and flash-forwards; and when we enjoy peeks into AUs and mirror universes. And it can get wonderfully deep: The joy and fascination can be about skin and sex appeal, humor, seeing a different side of a familiar character, learning more about a culture or a universe, learning more about a character's past or future, delighting in the characters (or the actors) acting as other characters, mixing genres, or feeling pride when far-away and/or alien fictional characters want to dress like us. (Well, I say "us" as someone who identifies with many of the cultures the show paid homage to.) And more.
All this isn't unique to DS9, of course. I've experienced the same with the other Treks, and Stargate: Atlantis, and Battlestar Galactica, and basically any show or movie where the characters have a typical outfit, or even a typical way of dressing, that gets occasionally interrupted. (And then there's a show like Community, which is made of dress-up, yet somehow by putting its characters in wildly new getups basically every other week it manages to retain the thrill. But that is a subject for another time.)
So that is the text block. What I'd like to do in the rest of this post is talk about how DS9 explored different kinds of out-of-uniform dress-up, illustrated with ~80 lovely screen shots, and touch on what I love about them and why.
( First, let's establish our baseline. )
Written for the "dressup" square on my Bingo card.
