Star Trek: Discovery season 2's Klingon redesign explained by show's costume designer

Star Trek: Discovery costume designer Gersha Phillips has shed more light into the redesign of the Klingons between seasons one and two.

For the second season of the CBS All Access show, the humanoid alien species have grown their hair out, now that there is peace.

Speaking to Digital Spy, Phillips also provided insight into the differences in the armour that the Klingons wear and how they complement the storytelling.

"Those changes came from the script that we got, so it's a producer/writer-driven decision," she explained. "The idea is that because the Klingons are not at war and not at wartime, they grew their hair and they don't wear their armour in the same way.

"I did keep some armour – and also, Kol-sha was in armour – so we echoed stuff that we had done before.

"We made it a little different, but we did still echo some of the armour. Because the Klingons are a warring, militaristic species, we did want to keep some of that feeling... so when you see L'Rell at the beginning, she does have her weapon on her. She's holstered, because they're ready.

"They're still battle-ready of a certain kind, but it's slightly different."

Star Trek: Discovery boss Alex Kurtzman previously indicated that some of the fan criticism of how different the Klingons looked in the first season compared to their appearance in previous Star Trek series played a part in the redesign.

And Phillips shared that, in regards to the species' costume design, her focus was on "blending the two stories".

She said: "I think the idea was that [the producers] wanted things to be a little more cohesive with the canon while keeping what we started with – blending the two stories. It's a combination of both, in my mind.

"I'm really proud of what we did. I think they look great – and there's definitely some good stuff coming up, so that will be great, too."

Phillips added that the costume design department works closely with the other departments on the show including the producers and production designers. The high level of communication between everybody ensures that viewers see an extremely rich and cohesive world.

"We communicate a lot," she said. "As soon as they break the story [of an episode], they'll give us an outline and it's about ten pages, sometimes less. It gives us an outline of what's going to happen in the episode.

"With that document, we have a department head meeting where we have the showrunners, myself, the production designer, prop, all the key players, our lighting guys, EP (executive producer)... we're all there.

"We're sitting in the room, and we read through the document and we flag any issues with whether we think we can get everything done within the timeframe and the budgets that we have to work with. And then we go from there.

"It's really collaborative, and everybody's there to make the best project we can with the products we have. It's a great experience."

Elsewhere, Phillips talked about the Discovery uniforms and why she made the uniforms gender neutral.

Star Trek: Discovery airs on CBS All Access in the US and Netflix internationally, including the UK.

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Source: www.digitalspy.com