Dressed to impress

To see Star Wars Celebration in 2017, you’d never have known Star Wars conventions were the underdog. It takes 15 minutes to walk across the floor and everyone is in meticulously handcrafted costumes, so accurate and professional-looking it’s almost impossible to tell who is a sanctioned photo-op character and who’s a ticket-holding member of the public.

The toilets are thick with hairspray and grease paint in every colour. Standing in line between a virginal Princess Leia and Captain Phasma, the terrifyingly shiny female Stormtrooper, I start to feel a bit like I’ve turned up to Own Clothes Day in full school uniform. I’m not sure I even brushed my hair this morning, let alone spent hours painting my entire body blue.

“The level of detail in the costumes here is like nothing I’ve ever seen before,” says veteran convention-goer Kerry. “You go to cons and there are some people who are really good and some people who kinda threw something together. But here the amount of accurate and highly detailed costumes is… daunting.”

I meet people who have travelled from Japan, Brazil, Peru and Chile on a sci-fi pilgrimage. Many of them are laden with camp chairs and sleeping bags. They spent the night on the concrete pavement, queuing for the major panels to catch a glimpse of Harrison Ford or, amazingly for the fans, Star Wars’ creator George Lucas, a man who seems to have created the prototype for the Strong Independent Female Lead almost by accident.

Because for many of the women at Celebration, there’s one major reason for their all-encompassing love of Star Wars: Leia. Vast numbers of women have come dressed as their favourite ass-kicking princess. There are pre-school Leias stumbling over their robes and at least one elderly Leia. There are flowing white dresses paired with cinnamon-bun hair around every corner. “I love Disney but I was never a princess,” stage host Amanda Wirtz says. “When I saw Leia I was like, that’s who I wanna be!”

“I like that she’s a princess but she’s not prissy or dainty,” says Kerry, who dressed as Leia the day before. “She carries a gun and she makes hard choices and she fights back when she needs to, but she’s still very compassionate. She’s not just this princess who needs to be rescued all the time, she’s a strong woman who’s still making the hard decisions but not losing her femininity.”

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