page_title: Star Trek uniforms
section_title: Star Trek: The Original Series
hierarchical_section_title: Star Trek uniforms / Original series / Star Trek: The Original Series
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context_page_description: Star Trek uniforms are costumes worn by actors portraying personnel from the fictitious organization Starfleet in the Star Trek science fiction franchise. Costume design often changed between various television series and films, especially those representing different time periods, both for appearance and comfort. Deliberately mixing styles of uniforms from the various series was occasionally used to enhance the sense of time travel or alternative universes.
context_section_description: The original uniform material was velour. This was used in the first and second seasons because it was cheap and easy to care for, but it shrank after it was dry-cleaned, and it tore easily. Thus it was replaced in the third season by a nylon fabric used in professional baseball uniforms. Differently colored shirts were worn with dark gray trousers — which appeared black on camera — for the men.
  While the two pilot episodes depict women wearing trousers, most female Federation personnel wear more revealing costumes after a request from NBC; Grace Lee Whitney suggested miniskirts. William Shatner observed that Star Trek, "to the appreciation of all the men on the set, in fact all around the world, would boast the shortest skirts on women of any regular series on television". Miniskirt-length dresses (of the same materials and colors as the shirts) with cheer briefs and dark tights were worn by the women. Black boots were worn by both sexes. Nichelle Nichols did not believe that the miniskirts were unusually short or revealing:
  I was wearing them on the street. What's wrong with wearing them on the air? I wore 'em on airplanes. It was the era of the miniskirt. Everybody wore miniskirts.
  On certain occasions, the characters would wear dress uniforms (TOS: first shown in "The Menagerie"  and later used in "Court Martial," "Space Seed," "Journey to Babel," and "The Savage Curtain") that are made of a shinier fabric, presumably a polyester satin, and are decorated with gold piping and colored badges that vary depending on rank. Montgomery Scott's dress uniform, especially as seen in "The Savage Curtain," includes a Scottish tartan. Specifically, it is the tartan of the Clan Scott, one of Scotland's oldest clans.
  Jumpsuits in the same colors with black undershirts were also worn, mostly by background characters.
  Beginning with the first regular series episode "The Man Trap", the department colors were slightly altered from the pilot versions: command and helm personnel wear gold shirts; operations, engineering and security personnel wear red; and science and medical personnel wear blue, all with black collars and undershirts.  The most commonly used Command Section shirts were actually olive-green in color, but they appeared to be a golden-yellow color called tenné both under the lights used on the set and in the post-development film stock. In later series, the gold color was canonized in dialog. However, some uniforms – the alternate shirts worn by Captain Kirk, and the Command Section dress uniforms – were made of a different material which, while the same color, showed up as olive-green even under the lights and when photographed. The green shirts (seen in TOS: "The Trouble with Tribbles", "Charlie X" and "The Immunity Syndrome") may have the rank stripes on the sleeves or on the collar (TOS: "The Enemy Within"), and always feature the Enterprise assignment patch near the waist as a belt fastener.
  Rank stripes around the cuffs were still used to show rank, though more levels had been introduced to differentiate between ranks, and thus identify characters. For most characters, two types of stripe were used: one solid and one dotted; the solid stripe design appears to follow the design of the 'chief' stripe from "The Cage". Captain Kirk wore two solid stripes with a dotted stripe inbetween the two, Commanders (such as Spock) wore two stripes, Lieutenant Commanders (such as Scott and McCoy) wore one solid stripe and one dotted stripe, Lieutenants (such as Uhura and Sulu, as well as many background characters) wore one stripe, whilst Ensigns (such as Chekov and countless background characters) and all enlisted personnel had no stripes at all. Only once was there a rank shown for Lieutenant Junior Grade: a single dotted stripe. Commodores, when seen, wore a wide gold braid with a gold stripe above and below, but flag officers had no distinct uniform of their own.
  The frequent death of red-uniformed security officers led to the coining of the popular term "redshirt".
caption: Examples of uniforms from the Original Series
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