A lot happens in the first three episodes of Season 2 of “Andor.” But if Disney+ is looking for a new multicam sitcom, they could do a whole lot worse than the home life of ISB officer Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) and imperial bureaucrat Syril Karn (Kyle Soller), set up in a big apartment on the capital planet of Coruscant where the furious, repressed vibe between them is just as stark as the white walls.
The dinner the couple throws for Syril’s mother Eedy (the majestic Kathryn Hunter) in Episode 3 stands as a counterpoint to the Chandrilan wedding ceremony Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) puts on for her daughter Leida (Bronte Carmichael) — the former is small and soulless in contrast to the ancient rites and conspicuous display of the latter. But this is one of the few glimpses that “Star Wars” has ever given us of Imperials out of uniform, and what that looks like is what’s so funny.
The sequence begins with the pair setting up their dining table and finishing the cooking, in the same completely blank whites and greys as the apartment they live in. The little bit of smooth jazz on Brandon Roberts’ score only emphasizes that the pair is living in a wholly anonymous, minimalistic template that provides them no true comfort, just the facade of abundance.
We cut next to a shot of Dedra in a (white, of course) robe, weighing outfit options against a mirror and forcing a smile. Gough’s performance is a savage self-immolation of a woman who only knows how to feign joy — and then only ever in extremis — but equally crucial to the moment is the clothing that costume designer Michael Wilkinson arms her with. They’re sets of completely monochromic tops and pants, either wholly black or wholly white. Behold, the fruits of empire.
That Dedra has no color in her life is very funny, but there’s also a point to it. Our ambitious ISB whelp has just returned from a secret council with the goal of figuring out how to isolate and depopulate the planet Ghorman so that Director Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) can extract its rare minerals for use in the construction of the Death Star, making Ghorman uninhabitable in the process. She’s been afforded a seat at the table in the proverbial Room Where It Happens — “it” is complete planetary and cultural genocide, but, you know. Still.
Yet this call-up to the big leagues is followed by sequences that demonstrate Dedra’s work hasn’t made her richer, more secure, or more powerful. She is still constrained and laughably small. She always will be. That limit of Imperial expression isn’t just embedded into Gough’s performance, either. It’s stitched in the costumes Wilkinson designed for her.
“We’ve never really seen an Imperial officer off-duty in a domestic setting, so I knew I wanted to create Dedra’s civilian clothing to be as strict as her uniform — razor-sharp tailoring, metallic detailing, and crisp, precise lines, a complete lack of humanity. But somehow alluring,” Wilkinson told IndieWire. “To her, the only options are black or white, in life and in clothing.”
There’s a general starkness and a coldness that runs through all Imperial designs and, by reflection, Wilkinson’s approach to Coruscanti fashion as well. “I wanted it to have a big city slickness and lack of empathy. Of course, there are people from all over the galaxy in Coruscant, but at its heart is the Imperial Intelligence Bureau, the ISB. I approached the Imperial fashion by stripping everything back to a severe minimalism that reflects their black and white morality,” Wilkinson said.
The “Andor” costume designer specifically picked an orange outfit full of ornaments and busy lines for Syril’s overbearing mother Eedy, so that she could stride into the gleaming, sterile chasm of Dedra and Syril’s apartment and explode “like a shock-wave,” Wilkinson said.
Color and detail are life, in the costumes and in the wider cultures that “Andor” explores. Wilkinson and the costume team needed to create palettes, textures, and silhouettes that capture whole worlds, be it the warm agricultural community that Bix (Adria Arjona), Wilmon (Muhannad Ben Amor), and Brasso (Joplin Sibtain) have settled in on Mina-Rau or the sumptuously formal and rigid ceremonial clothing of Chandrila. “The joy and the challenge of designing for ‘Andor’ is that the costumes have to reflect the full spectrum of human experience,” Wilkinson said.
The costume designer’s approach to the imperials is part of that spectrum, just a strict and stunted one that Wilkinson described as uncompromising and unsympathetic, whether it comes to the ISB uniforms or the imperial labor camp on Narkina 5 — and that both are so prisonlike is, perhaps, telling. “I feel at the heart of ‘Star Wars’ is the struggle for independence and individual rights — and I have always aimed to use costumes to tell that story,” Wilkinson said.
When it comes to the Imperials, telling that story is a battle of inches. “There is a danger that things flatten out too much, so I always make sure I put some extra thought into making [the Imperial costumes] visually compelling,” Wilkinson said. “For example, there are actually three tones of grey that I use for the ISB uniforms — from the stark, blinding tones of the senior officers to the pale icy grey of the lower ranks. I chose fabric that the camera will like, that light in an interesting way, or that have textures that bring life to the costume.”
As Nemik (Alex Lawther) says in Season 1, tyranny requires constant effort. There is a vast tide of Imperial functionaries, from soldiers to bureaucrats to technicians, all conforming to survive the predations of the Emperor’s whims. Wilkinson’s costumes not only distinguish the roles and ranks that will eventually show up on Wookieepedia. They visually portray the brittle authority of the empire, the embossed piping and glinting strong lines that are, in fact, the mask of fear.
Trust “Andor” Season 2 to also show us what’s left when that mask comes off, at home getting ready for a dinner party — almost nothing.
Both Dedra and Syril choose to wear very high collars on their “leisure” outfits as well as their uniforms, the fabric reaching round their necks. It remains to be seen whether or not some hand further up the Imperial chain of command will try to force-choke this budding power couple, but Wilkinson, Gilroy, and the entire creative team make it clear that that doesn’t really matter. They are already strangling themselves.
“Andor” Season 2 is streaming on Disney+.
