What is up with Vulcan fashion history?
Ok, this post has been building up for a while now, but Discovery has just confused me more. We’ll be focusing on women’s fashion here, since that’s the bit that interests me and which has exhibited most change.
See, in the TOS era, Vulcan women’s fashion looked like this.
Ok, including Amanda at the end there might be cheating, as she is human and might thus have very different sensibilities where clothing and hair are concerned…but you have to admit, it fits in pretty well with T’Pring and T’Pau’s outfits.
Come the TNG era, on the other hand…
…ok, I admit, that’s not a great picture. And most of what we get of T’Pel is headshots.
Now, ok, we do still get some good old-fashioned TOS-style outrageous outfits, like this other T’Pel-
Or Perrin, Spock’s stepmother, who does not have anything on her predecessor for style.
Now, all right, this is perfectly understandable and explicable. After all, it’s not as though human fashion trends haven’t gone through massive shifts in the space of a century.
And it is notable that most of the returns to the old TOS design appear on older Vulcans like Ambassador T’Pel, or on Perrin, who is a) human and b) is married to an older Vulcan, and lives at the same strata of Vulcan society as Ambassador T’Pel. This might just be a social status thing, or it might be a case of fashion evolution over time - it’s difficult to get a proper sense of it.
But then we get into prequels, and that’s where things get screwy.
So, here we see a continuation of the Vulcan female aesthetic established by T’Pel (the one married to Tuvok, not the ambassador), married to some of the aesthetic sensibilities of TOS. Short, practical haircuts and a lack of excessive ornamentation, but in brighter colours and patterns than we see with T’Pel’s very plain gown in Voyager. The only really conspicuously outlandish costume here is T’Pol’s, and that can be attributed to the Star Trek creators’ strange obsession with unflattering jumpsuits regardless of whether they make sense.
So, ok, from this we can get a rough idea of the progression of Vulcan fashion history, with a default of short hair and little visible ornamentation, which is disrupted around the 23rd century. I’m inclined to attribute that to Amanda’s influence on Vulcan fashion, but that’s just me.
But then, we have Discovery.
Aaand we’re back to the style established for Vulcans by the TNG era and built on since then in the reboot. With the exception of Michael’s gorgeous red robes in that first picture, the colours are fairly neutral, the cut is largely unadventurous, and even Amanda doesn’t appear to be pushing the fashion envelope the way she used to.
Now, let’s be clear, I did enjoy Discovery a great deal, but at the same time, I do miss the crazy Vulcan fashions of this era, and it’s definitely causing me no end of headaches re: Vulcan and Klingon fashion history.
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