I was about fifteen minutes into my third viewing of Blade Runner 2049 when I stopped caring about the plot entirely. Not because it’s bad – hell no – but because I got completely fixated on Ryan Gosling’s coat. You know the one, that long gray thing he wears through most of the film. There’s something off about how it moves, how the fabric catches light, how the collar sits on his shoulders. It’s subtle, but once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. The material has this slight stiffness that suggests manufacturing processes we don’t have yet, synthetic fibers designed for a world thirty years deeper into that particular dystopia.
That coat doesn’t just look futuristic – it feels like it belongs to someone who’s never known natural cotton or wool, who buys clothes from vending machines that print them on demand. Harrison Ford’s leather jacket in the original carries the weight of actual animal hide, crafted by hands that understood traditional materials. K’s coat whispers about a world where even basic clothing has become artificial, mass-produced by algorithms that optimize for durability over comfort.
And that’s when costume design in sci-fi really clicked for me. I’d spent years focusing on practical effects, cinematography, how directors built their worlds through sets and lighting, but I’d been ignoring one of the most powerful storytelling tools right there on screen. Clothes aren’t just clothes in good science fiction – they’re cultural artifacts, economic indicators, environmental responses all wrapped up in what characters wear every day.
You can tell immediately when a film gets this wrong. Characters wandering around in outfits that scream “costume department raided Hot Topic for space accessories,” or worse, wearing perfectly normal contemporary clothes in worlds that supposedly exist centuries in the future. It’s jarring as hell. Suddenly you’re not watching people living their lives, you’re watching actors wearing costumes, and the whole illusion collapses.
I remember when I first started really paying attention to this stuff, maybe eight or nine years ago, I was working on some corporate video about manufacturing processes (exciting, right?). Part of the research involved looking at actual space suit design, how NASA engineers solve problems of mobility and safety in environments humans weren’t meant to survive in. Turns out, pretty much everything you see characters wearing in space-based sci-fi would get you killed in about thirty seconds of actual zero gravity.
Loose fabric becomes a death trap when you’re floating around delicate equipment. Everything needs to be fitted, secured, with no dangling bits to catch on control panels or get sucked into air recyclers. But you also need flexibility for movement, temperature regulation for environments that swing from freezing to boiling, easy access to tools and emergency equipment. The more I learned about real space suit engineering, the more I realized most sci-fi completely ignores these basic survival requirements.
But here’s the thing – sometimes that’s exactly the right choice. Nobody wants to watch Star Wars if everyone’s wearing sensible, vacuum-sealed coveralls that actually make sense for space travel. The story needs those flowing robes and dramatic capes, even if they’d be impractical as hell for actual Jedi work. The trick is balancing the needs of good storytelling with enough internal logic that the world feels lived-in rather than artificial.
The Matrix nails this balance perfectly. Those long black coats make zero tactical sense if you’re trying to blend into 1999 Chicago or fight efficiently in simulated realities. Try doing kung fu in a leather trench coat sometime – you’ll understand why actual martial artists wear fitted clothing. But those outfits work because they signal something crucial about the characters’ relationship to both worlds they inhabit. The clothes are simultaneously timeless and completely out of place, which perfectly captures the weird liminal space Neo and the others occupy between simulation and reality.
Compare that to films where the costume designer clearly got told “make it look futuristic” and responded with shiny metallics and geometric shapes that would be torture to actually wear. I won’t name specific films, but we’ve all seen them. Characters wandering around in outfits that look deeply uncomfortable, made from materials that would be impractical for anything they’re actually supposed to be doing. The clothes become barriers between the audience and the story rather than invisible bridges into the world.
What really gets me excited is how subtle the best sci-fi costume work can be. Her does this brilliantly – those slightly high-waisted pants and soft color palettes create this sense of a near-future that’s more emotionally evolved than our current world, without beating you over the head with “LOOK, WE’RE IN THE FUTURE NOW.” The clothes feel like natural evolution rather than radical departure. They suggest changes in manufacturing technology, shifts in social attitudes toward comfort and formality, different priorities about what matters when people get dressed each morning.
I’ve started trying this myself in some of the spec scripts I mess around with. Take a contemporary garment and imagine how it might change if materials science advanced, if climate patterns shifted, if social structures evolved in specific directions. What would jeans look like if denim could actively regulate temperature? How would business attire change if most professional work happened in virtual spaces? It’s harder than you’d think, and it taught me something important about world-building – clothes are never just clothes. They’re artifacts that reveal economic systems, manufacturing capabilities, social hierarchies, environmental pressures.
Some of my favorite examples come from quieter productions that don’t have massive costume budgets. Ex Machina uses clothing to tell you everything about that isolated research facility’s weird power dynamics and Nathan’s particular brand of tech-bro narcissism. The guy wears workout clothes to business meetings because he can, because he’s built a world where normal social conventions don’t apply to him. Meanwhile, Ava’s “clothing” – if you can call exposed mechanical parts clothing – becomes central to questions about consciousness, embodiment, what it means to have an identity that exists in physical space.
Or look at Mad Max: Fury Road, where every piece of clothing has been repurposed, cobbled together, modified for survival in a world where industrial civilization collapsed decades ago. But there are still traces of the old world embedded in what people wear – wedding dresses repurposed as armor, corporate logos turned into tribal insignia, luxury items transformed into tools of survival. The clothes become archaeology, telling the story of how this world ended and what people saved from the wreckage.
I keep a notebook now specifically for costume observations. Whenever I see sci-fi clothing that works particularly well, I try to figure out why. What assumptions is the design making about this world’s technology, economy, social structures? How does it support or complicate the story being told? Most importantly – what would it actually feel like to live in those clothes, in that world?
Because that’s the ultimate test, isn’t it? Can you imagine actually wearing these things, day after day, in the world the film has created? When the answer is yes – when costumes feel like natural extensions of fully realized people rather than designer concepts draped on actors – that’s when the storytelling really works. The clothes disappear into the world, become invisible, and you’re left with pure story.
That’s what I’m always looking for in sci-fi films, that moment when all the craft elements align so perfectly that you forget you’re watching fiction at all. The future feels real because someone took the time to figure out what people would actually wear there.
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