Gersha Phillips Talks Star Trek: Discovery Season Two Costumes for FYC

Gersha Phillips - the costume designer for Star Trek: Discovery - has been doing her part for Discovery’s Emmy push. In two interviews over the past week, she’s talked about the challenge of dressing Ethan Peck’s Spock, redesigning Klingons yet again, and what it was like designing TOS-era costumes for a modern audience.

First, we head to Forbes, where, among other things, Phillips discussed being “terrified” by the prospect of dressing Spock. She said, “Our Spock is so different in terms of he knows what his character was going through in our script [with] the beard and the hair and all of that stuff. [...] For me, I tried to come up with a jeans and T-shirt version of what that Vulcan costume could look like.”

Yesterday, in an interview with Variety, Phillips expanded that to explain that the biggest challenges in season two were designing the Enterprise uniforms, costuming Klingons post-war, and the Talosians.

Of the Enterprise uniforms, she said, “Merging those two worlds together [The Original Series and Discovery] and then coming up with that costume, I’d say, was the biggest challenge off the top.”

With the Klingons, she said, “The idea was that they were out of war — it was peace time — so they were able to grow their hair and they wanted something that looked less militaristic, less battle-ready.”

And as for the Talosians, part of the challenge was creating something both futuristic and also contemporary. She said, “The Talosians, for instance, we printed fabric with a texture to create something that I thought would look better than the original. The way we constructed it was also something that created a much more structural feel about them.”

Just a reminder, voting for Emmy nominations are open next Monday, June 10th.