scans are from ST:M and Anders

Costumes and Make-up

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The words of resident costume designer for [TNG], Durinda Rice Wood, are shown in this colour

this page deals with developments in

Designing the costumes

"They said to me, 'This is going to be the new bad guy of the universe.' They gave us a little extra time. I think we got two weeks instead of one week! They wanted a new bad guy, and they wanted it to be a cyborg. They wanted something that was cold and like an automaton, they all kind of looked alike, and they didn't have emotions. That's what was going to be the scary thing about it. I was tired of the futuristic, clean, stainless-steel imagery of the time. I was interested in more texture, the ugliness of humanity, and the ugliness of nature. The idea was always that they would be half human and half mechanical. Their body parts would wear out and they would replace them with mechanical parts, so I wanted to make all of the mechanical parts different and unique for each person, thinking that their parts would wear out at different times. You know, when you get older one hip goes and that gets replaced, and it happens differently for everyone."

When you're designing for STAR TREK you really have to think of those things. This is the feeling I wanted with the face - I didn't want it to be so different than the rest of the body. I wanted it to melt into the costume more, but they wanted the face to be bright white. The thing is, we couldn't do it. We just couldn't do it in a week - we could have done it in three weeks. For something that the world has never seen before, you need time to develop it and invent it!

Far left: This drawing shows a new design evolving from Durinda's original plans. Middle and right: Durinda produced several drawings of her new design, which are not just an evolution but show how the drones could differ from one another.

A company I worked with already had certain mechanical human-part moulds, and so I incorporated those into my design. It was good in the end because this was the way they were meant to look, like a garbage yard, with parts from different places replacing their worn-out human parts. At around the same time, she came up with the idea of running tubes from one part of the Borg costumes to another. As she says, this helped to make it clear that each Borg drone was unique: I wanted each one to be different. There were certain parts that were totally anatomical, and then there would be a real leg that needed to have the tube.

I wanted them to be a little bit more greeny-black - in fact, in the first rendition of them the skin underneath was a dark, dark-greeny black, and the parts on top were black. So overall there would be a feeling of inky, greeny black - a sort of a sewer black. I didn't want it to be regular black.

The realities of television production intervened and the finished drones were a uniform color. The Borg acquired a more complex color scheme only when they were redesigned for [Star Trek: First Contact] with the advantage of a feature film budget.

Durinda also mentions the producers' intention that the Borg should be without recognizable gender. We were trying to make them androgynous. I remember somebody - I think it was Rick [Berman] - saying they shouldn't be totally male or female. That was part of the scariness of them; you couldn't work out whether they were male or female. In practice, nearly all of the actors have been male, but one of Durinda's early drawings shows a female drone, years before tv viewers were introduced to Seven of Nine in [Star Trek: Voyager].

Creating the costumes

I had to go through and totally design every single tube and everything that would go on each actor. I'm pretty sure that Michael [Westmore] told me what each person was wearing on their head, because he had to do the same thing; he had to figure out who had an eyepatch and who didn't, and so on.

Because the Borg combined costume, make-up and props, illustrator Rick Sternbach (who later worked on [Star Trek: Voyager]) was also asked to produce drawings for [TNG: Q Who?]. He recalls his drawings were a little different from Durinda's. "My drawings had a number of implants and some kind of a suit for the actor to wear. My early take on the color was more of a silvery gray."

Durinda found that actually putting the finished costumes together was a far from simple matter.

The way they were first done, it was an ordeal! I had a basic jumpsuit made out of a certain strange Spandex, and I found that one side of Velcro would stick on to the fabric. We built it so that all the tubes and things could stick on to the suit, and you'd get the guy in the suit and then you'd stick the parts on, and it was a real organizational challenge! We were experimenting, and it had evolved to this place when we ran out of time, so that's the way it had to be. Had I done the Borg again, I would have figured out a way to make it better; I would have had one suit and not had to deal with all the different parts.

The screenshots in this group are from [TNG: Q Who?], but the shot actually seen on television is not quite at this angle and not this close-up so I reproduce ST:M's image which shows more detail.

By the time the Borg appeared again, Durinda had left Star Trek and the task of improving the costumes fell to her successor, Robert Blackman (who later worked on [Star Trek: Voyager]). He recalls that the costumes stayed basically the same for [TNG: The Best of Both Worlds] but were significantly reworked for [TNG: I, Borg].

[TNG: Descent]

Robert Blackman: "That was a conscious effort to make them look less like jumpsuits with things applied to them and more like full bodysuits. They were brilliantly created by Durinda in such a short amount of time, but I felt that we had used them over and over again, and eventually you think, 'Oh, well, OK, there's too much space in between all of the stuff.' The connecting tissue was more dominant than the actual object, so I just visually reduced it and we tried to butt as much stuff up against each other as we could and still have the actors move. Then eventually I think Rick [Berman] and I came up with this together - we repainted them so that they were a little bit more rusty, a little bit less perfect.

Make-up

"She got everything from the neck down and I got everything from the neck up! They gave me her sketches and said, 'OK, here's the suit; now do something with the head.' The idea was that the Borg were almost drained of their blood. If we had them the same color as a human, they wouldn't be as scary, so their skin went very pale and we shadowed them. In fact, because of the continuity we wanted between a pale face and shadows in the eyes and the cheekbones, it forced me to learn how to use an airbrush. I couldn't give 10 Borgs to 10 makeup artists and have them turn out exacdy alike everybody did something a little different in their touch so it became easier to literally line them up, have everybody glue their heads on, get their white faces on them, and then I would take an airbrush and in one minute do all the shading on a Borg's face. That way they all started to look alike. From that time on almost every makeup artist on STAR TREKhas used an airbrush."

The original headpieces Westmore designed were relatively simple affairs that featured the tubing Durinda had designed for the costumes.

"They wanted to keep the makeup down because they had all the dressing to go through, so the heads in the very beginning were like helmets with a lot of tubing running around them. We would use a little round rubber appliance that we would glue onto their face and literally take the tube and glue it right into this little appliance. Of course, when you do the first one you think, 'Wow, this is great!' Then you think, well, how can I improve it? When I had the chance to design another Borg head, I made one that had a hole in the top of the head in the helmet, over each car, over a little patch in the front on the forehead, and in the back of the head. Then I made little patches that you could use to close those openings up. That way I could make one helmet and I could modify it by closing up certain areas on it so it looked like a lot of different helmets."

Most drones still had full helmets, but when Patrick Stewart played Locutus (Locutus of Borg is mentioned by Janeway in [Scorpion]), Westmore designed a smaller headpiece that featured a tiny laser.

"My son Michael, who did all the Borg electronics in the eyes and the head, found this little laser that was only one inch long. We mounted it on Patrick Stewart as Locutus. There's that scene at the end of the first part of 'The Best of Both Worlds' where Patrick turns his head and looks directly into the camera with his laser. We had no idea what was going to happen. Boy, the phone rang! Rick [Bermanj saw it and said, 'Oh, my God, what a great effect.' Now that's an effect that could cost thousands of dollars to do if you wanted to say 'This is what I want to do,' and this was done with a little cheap laser."

The adapted Borg costumes were finally replaced for [Star Trek: First Contact], when Deborah Everton designed an entire new set of suits, which have remained in use ever since. In addition the make-up changed at that time.