Original costumes from the ‘Star Wars’ films are featured in museum exhibit

Darth Vader’s breastplate may look like it’s made of some high-tech material, but it’s really painted wood. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s cloak looks like it’s burlap or something, but it’s really made of silk.

Those are among the surprises that await visitors to a new exhibition titled “Star Wars and the Power of the Costume” that opens Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. The exhibition centers around original costumes from the entire “Star Wars” series.

“These are one-of-a-kind works of art,” exhibition manager Saul Drake said. “Some of them only show up for a few seconds on screen, and you never get a chance to see the elaborate work that goes into them.”

Drake is in St. Petersburg, accompanying the exhibition from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The Smithsonian created the exhibition in collaboration with Lucasfilm and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Arts. The exhibition has traveled to several other cities across the country, and it’s been a hit everywhere it has been shown.

Whether you’re a certified “Star Wars” geek who knows every character and every subplot from every film, or a casual fan of the series, the exhibition has something for you, Drake said. In fact, even people who don’t know a wookie from an ewok should find it edifying.

“It’s for anyone who’s interested in the creative process,” Drake said.

Many of the iconic costumes had their roots in other films, in art or in history.

Princess Leia’s “slave bikini,” for example (yes, it’s part of the exhibition) was almost a carbon-copy of one that Yvonne DeCarlo wore in a 1947 comedy called “Slave Girl.”

And Carrie Fisher actually wore two different bikinis in “Return of the Jedi,” although both looked identical on film. The one she wore while she sat still was made of metal. The second, the one that is at the Museum of Fine Arts, is a vacuum-formed plastic bikini that allowed Leia to move around and kill Jabba the Hutt.

The exhibition is more than just a display of costumes. It includes sketches that show the evolution of the costumes and the characters, interactive stations that let you wield virtual light sabers, videos from people such as Anthony Daniels, the actor who played C-3P0, talking about what it was like to be inside the droid’s skin. (There’s an original C-3PO in the exhibition.)

There’s also a “wookie button” that you can press to hear all manner of wookie utterances.

Drake and Jorge Vidal, the project manager for the Museum of Fine Arts, pointed out that the costumes from the earliest films are often plain and inexpensive. Parts of Darth Vader’s costume really were made of wood, and Leia pretty much wore one white cotton dress through the first three films. In prequels, after the franchise was a proven money-maker, costumes were often elaborate and expensive, and it’s not always evident on screen how opulent the costumes are. You can see the opulence when you view the costumes up-close in the exhibition, Vidal said, and the costumes truly are works of art.

“They are the height of haute couture,” Vidal said. “We put the costumes side-by-side so you can see the contrast.”

The costumes are real art, and the exhibition is a real art exhibition. Curators from the Smithsonian are on hand throughout the exhibition in St. Petersburg to provide more information about the costumes.

Besides the traveling exhibition — the culmination of 10 years of work involving the the Smithsonian and the Lucas organizations — the Museum of Fine Arts has added a whole extra room of Star Wars items that weren’t on display in other stops on the tour.

“We definitely have stuff for the ‘Star Wars’ nerd,” Vidal said. “But if you’re interested in how artists develop ideas, whether you like ‘Star Wars’ or not, there’s something for you, too.”

This story was originally published November 3, 2017 at 12:28 PM with the headline "Original costumes from the ‘Star Wars’ films are featured in museum exhibit."