Analysis, part 1 - Overview

We'll start our analysis with a quick overview. 

The DS9/NEM formal uniform was comprised of two garments: a jacket and trousers. 

The garment style and construction were more or less the same for both genders except for the obvious anatomical differences. 

The jacket was made of two fabrics: wool gabardine for the jacket body, sleeves, and collar (sometimes - more on that later!), and wool elastique for the yoke and "bib." 

You can clearly see the two different fabrics (yoke and body) in these auction photos of screen-used jackets:

the DS9/NEM formal jackets appeared white on screen, but were, in actuality, an "off white" color?

The actual, off-white color of the jacket fabrics can be observed when the hook-and-loop tape ("Velcro") patch for the communicator, which was actually white, can be seen for comparison:

In fact, the "off white" gabardine and elastique didn't even seem to match each other! It's not noticeable, though, as the seams between the two were nearly always obscured by the "trim" and was thus, surprisingly, not jarring at all.

For ease of communication, though, from this point forward, we'll be referring to the jacket, and its fabrics, simply as "white," but you should know that they were not actually white but off-white.

The jackets were rather short (with the bottom front being at about navel level), and the trousers quite high (extending well up onto the rib cage), by contemporary fashion standards.

Uniform garments like this might be familiar to those who have, say, played in a marching band:

But for most people, wearing garments like this might take a while to get used to.

Lastly, there were three versions of the jacket (not including the live musicians in Nemesis): a version for officers, a version for captains, and a version for admirals. 

(We're not sure whether or not enlisted personnel wore the officer version of the jacket, as apparently nobody thought to invited Chief O'Brien to Riker and Troi's wedding, even though it was on Earth and O'Brien was, last we heard, teaching at Starfleet Academy ...) 

The three versions were all very similar, but they had a few slight differences. 

The main difference was that the officers' jackets had gray bibs and collars, while captains and admirals had white bibs and collars. 

Also, the admiral jackets' sleeve cuffs were slightly different, which we'll look at when we get to the sleeve cuffs. 

The formal trousers were the same, regardless of which version of the jacket was worn. 

Now, let's take a good hard look at the garments themselves! 

NOTE: For a garment that only had a grand total of about 12 minutes of screen time, there was notable and even surprising variation in the DS9/NEM formal uniforms - most of it subtle, but also undeniable. We'll present our research, the conclusions we've drawn regarding ideal standards, as well as outliers and what we believe to be production errors.


NEXT: Analysis, part 2 - Collar