Star Trek: Discovery's Costume Designer On Creating Season 5 Starfleet Uniforms, Breen Suits & Saru's Wedding Attire

Costume designer Anthony Tran developed the unforgettable looks for Star Trek: Discovery's final season. Tran was an assistant costume designer on Star Trek: Picard season 1, and he joined Star Trek: Discovery season 5 after designing the costumes for Kung Fu on The CW, Lizzie McGuire on Disney+, and How I Met Your Father on Hulu.

Star Trek: Discovery was an intergalactic adventure that saw the crew of the USS Discovery exploring new planets, meeting new aliens, and even leaping forward 30+ years into the future. Anthony Tran's work for Star Trek: Discovery season 5 included designing a new look for the Breen, costuming the villainous couple Moll (Eve Harlow) and L'ak (Elias Toufexis), and outfitting the bride, groom, and guests for the wedding of Ambassador Saru (Doug Jones) and President T'Rina (Tara Rosling).

Screen Rant had the pleasure of interviewing Anthony Tran about designing the looks for Star Trek: Discovery season 5, updating the Breen for the 32nd century, and designing 'the royal wedding of the future.'

Costume Designer Anthony Tran On Joining Star Trek: Discovery In Season 5

Screen Rant: Star Trek Discovery is a universe away from Kung Fu and How I Met Your Father. You joined Discovery for season 5?

Anthony Tran: Correct. I was the assistant costume designer for the first season of Picard. I had just finished How I Met Your Father. And they called and said, 'Would you be interested in doing [Discovery]? And it felt like a very great full circle moment.

What are the challenges of joining Star Trek? I've heard everything is bespoke. Everything has to be created from scratch. You can't go off the rack for your Breen uniforms.

Anthony Tran: And even if you go to buy something, we've changed it, 90% of it, where you wouldn't even recognize that we bought it at the store. I mean, it's a huge undertaking. We had a 65-person costume department, so many talented artisans. The management, the logistics of it, are huge. I give full credit to Michelle Paradise and Alex [Kurtzman] because they had scripts so far in advance.

By the time I started prep, we knew so much of where the story was going. I knew about the Breen, I knew there was going to be a wedding. So there were so many things that we could get ahead of. So a lot of the bigger challenges, like the Breen, we were prototyping so early, because once you start shooting, you never stop. So it was nice to get such a head start on stuff.

A lot of the costumes, like the Starfleet uniforms, were introduced in seasons 3 and 4. What were you excited about in terms of new costumes to design when you came in for season 5?

Anthony Tran: When I met with Michelle and 'Tunde [Osunanmi], and they were telling me about the story of the season, it became pretty clear that in every episode they were going to be going somewhere. And so, I think the excitement of that, as a kid who loves Xena and Hercules -- Remember? They go into a different town [or] go these new worlds every episod -- the idea [I liked] was getting to do a TV show where every episode kind of like a microcosm of a film, where there was its own world, its own entity, was very, very exciting.

The wedding was definitely... From the beginning, they mentioned it literally maybe five minutes in our conversation. They're like, 'Yeah, there's gonna be a wedding.' And I was like, 'A wedding? Tell me more about the wedding'. That was very, very exciting. Building worlds and cultures is just always exciting. So that was a real joy, for sure.

Star Trek: Discovery cast seems like a group of actors who'd be really fun to dress. There's no sameness on Discovery. Everyone is different, different body types, but they all look really good in costume. So what's like dressing everybody?

Anthony Tran: It's amazing. It's really, really collaborative bunch. But also, because they've been doing it [for] five seasons, they know the drill. They understand what it is to wear neoprene on your body, and what the breathability is, and just what it is to be uncomfortable. And they also, because they know their characters so well, it becomes very, very easy, when you're in a thing to be like, 'I really needed to move my arm this way. What can we do?'

And so, it becomes very, very collaborative, the push and the pull of it, and they get excited. I mean, that's always exciting. They come in, they look at the renderings, they read the scripts, and they get excited, and I think that makes you excited. It couldn't be a lovelier bunch of people.

Designing Saru's New Costume As A Federation Ambassador

Before Saru got married, he left Starfleet and became an Ambassador. Tell me about dressing him as an Ambassador. He has a brand-new costume that looks so regal.

Anthony Tran: We did two versions of it. But the idea became that he was going to kind of be this diplomatic officer, and what that would look like. So it was riffing off the idea of a business suit of the future, but using the tailoring and technology of the 32nd century in Trek, and so, kind of abstracting it. He's obviously so tall and lean, like Doug [Jones] himself, and the body of that character, and so [it was about] really playing with the monochromatic elements to make him look really, really tall.

We used two shades of blue. So, using the darker shade to sculpt out his body. And for his draped collars, we found really interesting ways that we're kind of inspired by Japanese culture in terms of the way we folded things in and pulled them out. And he was so game and so excited to, I think, wear something new. He's the loveliest man. He would put on those boots and parade around the fitting room for you so you could see how things move and all that.

Doug Jones really is the nicest man. I've met and interviewed him a bunch of times.

Anthony Tran: Truly. Even on a day that is so challenging where we're shooting in the forest, and he's running around and chased by things, Doug would literally stop when he saw me to have a five-minute conversation and then just keep running. Truly a lovely, lovely human being.

Designing Eve Harlow's Moll Costume & Updating The Breen For Star Trek: Discovery

Eve Harlow raved about Moll's costume on her Instagram. I'm with her, Moll looks awesome. And so does Elias Toufexis as L'ak. Tell me about designing their costumes.

Anthony Tran: The script called them a futuristic kind of Bonnie and Clyde. Michelle was really clear that she really liked a biker gang kind of influence for them, but flipping it to the 32nd century. Working with Eve was great. She was just finishing a show in Vancouver, and we got her pretty last minute in terms of trying to fit her for a costume. And the costume I designed... I remember we had a phone conversation. She was like, 'I don't think I will look good in this costume.' And I was like, 'No, no, no, we'll get there, we'll get there.' She's like, 'I really am not sure this costume is for me.' And I was like, 'Just come to the fitting room, we just come to the fitting room.' And she put it on.

In five minutes, she was like, 'I get it, I get it.' And that is a tribute not just to design, but the tribute really is to the person who made that costume. Her name is Ritta [Koleva], and she also made T'Rina's wedding dress. She understood Eve's body, so just a phenomenal job there.The harnessing and the way we kind of wove things together, things that really felt tactical while being cool. It was the same thing with Elias' costime for L'ak. We knew he was a Breen. That was clear to us when we were working on the show early on. So I was like, 'How do we nod to that in a way where you probably wouldn't recognize it?' But if you went back for a second, you notice that the entire jacket he was wearing is on that same diagonal line, all the seams of the pockets are all slanted. There's a tubing technology that we incorporated, which was inspired by NASA cooling suits. And that was the idea, that was the refrigeration technology.

So if you look at L'ak's costume and the Breen costume, they have the same technology because the idea is he's on the run. And the only world he's known is the Breen world. And so, the aesthetic he would be wearing and the technology he would be using would be derivative of things he knew from that world. So just the way we broke down the costumes, it was like six layers of paint of different colors. So nothing was fully black. It looks black, but the way that in different lighting that it plays, L'ak's costume is actually green. Which we knew because of the way his skin was colored. So just the idea of giving things dimensions, knowing they're on the run, knowing they're getting into these battles, and making them really feel like they were lived in and rough and tumble.

L'ak's costume is different from the Breen costumes, right? The refrigeration suits, which are beautiful. They're like works of art.

Anthony Tran: Thank you. So the Breen costume was the greatest undertaking. We knew it was the season of the Breen, and we knew we had to make a lot [of costumes]. And so, there's the logistical element of, 'How are you going to make these for different body types and make them relatively quickly in the scope of a TV timeframe?' And then, aesthetically paying homage. Obviously, the costumes in Deep Space Nine are so specific. I remember when they were like, 'We need to update the brain costume.' I sat there for a while, and I found on Google photos from a Christie's Auction of a Breen costume. And they had a detailed helmet, front, side, back. I really studied that for the key hallmarks, knowing that we were gonna slim them down just because that's the aesthetic of the 32nd century.

Knowing from conversations that we were going to push in that beak of the helmet, just because it seemed to serve no function. There was a minute when I thought we were going to see the Breen's faces until I saw the makeup design. There was going to be an element that made that make sense, but when I saw that the makeup that was designed was relatively low profile, I was just going to push [the beak] in a little bit. You'll notice that we kept a little bit of their snout, but the hallmarks are there. That straight green line [of the helmet], I broke up at the ends a little bit just to make it feel a little bit modern. I used a lot of the lines on the helmet and just broke them into plates so they looked like they're more dimensional. The grills we kept, the idea was that maybe it was venting for refrigeration technology.

The original Breen costume had this backpack. We slimmed it down, we made it more architectural, but it's the same style lines if you look at it. And the idea for me was that was the genesis of the cooling technology, whatever it was, that was in these backpacks. And so, you'll notice tubing that comes out of it that connects into the helmet. The tubing is the same on the helmets as it was in Deep Space Nine, the style of the plates is the same. Even the grid texture on their bandoliers is all the same, we just updated the way we cut it so it looks more sleek. Obviously now, with the nature of 3D printing, we're able to get so fine with our details. But yeah, if they feel like a futuristic soldier version, I feel, of that original costume.

Designing The Costumes For Saru & T'Rina's Wedding

Let's talk about Saru and T'Rina's wedding. Tell me about designing those costumes.

Anthony Tran: With T'Rina, we had Trekkies in our costume department. I remember I was like, 'Surely there's been other Vulcan weddings.' I knew about T'Pring, both in The Original Series, also in Strange New Worlds. And then someone was like, 'Have you ever looked at Enterprise?' There was a character named T'Pol, and she had this veil that was literally sitting on the back of her head. So, blending inspirations and knowing that there was an identity to Vulcan culture, we kept the strong shoulder that T'Rina. And then the idea came of, 'How do we do a futuristic lace?' Lace is what almost every wedding dress is made out of. How do we do a 32nd century version of that?

So I took the Ni'Var logo. And then, there was kind of the stripping element that was in the T'Pring costumes in The Original Series. Using that as formal style lines, we used leather, and we laser cut it out. We mapped out Tara's body, and we mapped that out onto a pattern so it's very, very specific for her the way it's cut. So it's super, super flattering. And also, all that gets hand applied on. It was a very intensive process that a lot of people were like, 'Oh my gosh.' The fabric is actually like basket weaving. It's raffia basket weaving so it looks really, really textured and cool. And then that veil from T'Pol inspired her veil, I just made it more architectural. It was partially inspired by Princess Grace's wedding dress from the 1950s, lace, and then a giant geometric structure.

And Saru's costume was meant to be a little bit Vulcan in terms of the strong shoulder but playing with Kepliens colors and the way that they're draped. Super, super heavy. I think it was like 40 pounds. Doug was like, 'This is the most beautiful thing I've ever worn,' and I'm like, 'I'm sure you say that to everyone. But thank you so much.' The costume was mohair, actually, that we shaved, and we dyed into, and then we used foil on top of it. So it's kind of a marrying of cultures, that he's kind of assuming a little bit of hers, and she's assuming a little bit of his. And the guests... It was just a lot of fun. For me, it was like the royal wedding of the future. What does that look like? So we did a lot of crazy millinery with a guy who walked around with no eyes because he created this whole kind of costume. There was just so much we did, our little easter eggs that are back there, which I don't know if anyone noticed because it moved by so quickly. But it was a lot of fun for us.

Creating Admiral Burnham's 33rd Century Starfleet Uniform For Star Trek: Discovery's Finale Epilogue

I also have to ask you about Discovery's finale coda jumping further into the future. Tell me about designing Admiral Burnham and the Starfleet uniforms of the future.

Anthony Tran: The Starfleet uniform, obviously, is pretty standardized in terms of color and cuts. So you think about. how do you put a new spin on that, especially knowing this is like so far in the future, further than we've ever seen? And so for me, my interests are always in the technology of how we put something together. I think if you look at that costume, we really stacked the way we sewed everything so it looks like everything's piped in and bound the way we put it together, just to create depth and dimension and build it out. It's still that same silhouette, but just the way it's put together is a little bit more tweaked and leveled.

And with Brendan's costume, we did the same thing. Just because that was our language for how we put those costumes together at that time. Burnham's is inspired by The Wrath of Khan a little bit. I love those uniforms. Her son's is inspired by the TNG jumpsuits, which is my favorite, probably, Starfleet uniform iteration. So there are little bits of references in terms of things that I responded to, and it's meant to be this great little callback and a celebration of the show itself, and of Trek.

About Star Trek: Discovery Season 5

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery finds Captain Burnham and the crew of the USS Discovery uncovering a mystery that will send them on an epic adventure across the galaxy to find an ancient power whose very existence has been deliberately hidden for centuries. But there are others on the hunt as well … dangerous foes who are desperate to claim the prize for themselves and will stop at nothing to get it.