Star Wars And The Power of Costume

 

Princess Leia
Princess Leia

For Christmas, my boyfriend bought me a ticket to see Star Wars andThe Power of Costume, an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg, Florida. It’s about a 2-hour drive from where we live, so this past Saturday I decided to make the drive up there to check it out.

Parking was a bit confusing, as on their website it claims that “valet parking with museum validation is available for museum members and visitors”, yet apparently really only members can get their parking validated, so if you go, prepare to pay $10 to park your car, unless you want to drive around Saint Petersburg for a while.

Once inside the museum, it was pretty easy to get my sticker and check out the exhibit, despite the fact that my actual ticket got lost somewhere in the shuffle of opening Christmas presents. They were able to look up the order number for me and I was all set.

Anakin & Padme wedding
Anakin & Padme wedding

The majority of the exhibit was precisely what you would exhibit–real costumes from all of the Star Wars movies, including the prequels and original trilogy as well as Episode VII. It was fun to see them up close and personal in real life. The detail on all of them is really amazing, especially on things like Padme’s wedding dress. There were actually a LOT of Padme’s dresses there. (She had a lot of clothes!)

There were also things like stormtrooper armor and droids. You could even see C-3PO and R2-D2 taken apart! The exhibit also included some of the concept art from the movies. It was interesting to see what Chewbacca was originally going to look like. Another item in the exhibit was a vest that showed how they kept Peter Mayhew cool inside the Chewbacca suit–it was actually a vest with a tube attached with cold water in it. Gotta stay cool somehow under all that fur!

Steps to put on Vader suit
Steps to put on Vader suit

One part of the exhibit I found interesting was a set of photos that showed how many steps were included in getting Hayden Christensen into the Vader suit. There are a lot of pieces to that suit, and a lot of steps. A lot of work for only one short scene in Episode III.

All in all, the exhibit was pretty interesting. It also included an audio portion you could listen to as you walked through the exhibit, but I only listened to a small part of it, as it was rather long and wordy. I did, however, appreciate the descriptions of each item in the exhibit and read most of them. Even then, it didn’t take very long to go through the whole exhibit. Someone else told me they went through it twice! Maybe I should have done that too. But it was still very enjoyable, and I’m glad I went and can say I’ve seen these costumes in person.

Check out more of my photos from the exhibit below!

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