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We had an actor-Pope once.
Under the press of first Nazi and then Soviet occupation, young Karol Wojtyla spun stories about people who never lived in places that didn’t exist. Later, his attention turned to playwriting and Biblical themes. He worked steadily as a poet throughout his priesthood and pontificate. St. John Paul the Great understood, then, the must-make-it-or-I’ll-die creative impulse... the kind that defies earthly powers to express divine ones.
Other popes write letters about Christian unity, theological themes, and social issues. This one, though, decided to speak not just to artists, but his fellow artists:
None can sense more deeply than you artists, ingenious creators of beauty that you are, something of the pathos with which God at the dawn of creation looked upon the work of his hands. A glimmer of that feeling has shone so often in your eyes when—like the artists of every age—captivated by the hidden power of sounds and words, colors and shapes, you have admired the work of your inspiration, sensing in it some echo of the mystery of creation with which God, the sole creator of all things, has wished in some way to associate you.
That is how Pope John Paul II's 1999 Letter to Artists opens. This pope intimately understood the intoxication of creative expression, the hypnotic nature of deeply, fully choosing to make something that wasn’t there before that moment: “Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future."
He connected these impulses mostly to sacred art, but the theater kid still thrived beneath the white cassock.
I have no idea what Shawna Trpcic’s spiritual life was like, but I do know that she experienced this inner flash of creation. She felt it while clothing characters she did not invent in a galaxy she never visited, one laden with rules, restrictions, expectations, and an unstable future.
Trpcic passed away this week of a sudden illness. But before she did, she created.
As a standout Star Wars costume designer, Trpcic harnessed sounds and words to colors and shapes, and the result was probably exactly what she wanted: People mostly didn’t notice the costumes, and that is because the costumes were exactly right. No one was jarred out of the fairy tale because the intergalactic fighter pilot looked like she just fell out of a bad dystopian bodice-ripper.
We hardcores, though… we did notice. We saw the respectful continuity to past films and the ingrained attention to character detail. I found at least 17 dream convention outfits in a single episode of The Book of Boba Fett alone. “It just looks like it belongs to a really real galaxy,” we’d tell each other, able to recognize the quality when we saw it, yet unable to describe precisely what it was.
Shawna Trpcic, however, not only figured it out what it was-- she did it. She clothed 21st century Star Wars, and it’s a dirtier, shiner, more fantastic, realer place because of it.
Star Wars fans of late nearly always have daggers drawn, but we could always agree that even the shows we hated looked great. If you had a problem with a Trpcic look, then congratulations– you just did the impossible and united the fanbase in yelling at you.
This woman’s costumes nobly carried the weight of interstellar time and galactic place. The weave of fabric is discernible when it needs to be discernible on a mystic newly connected with nature. And it is barely noticeable when it needs to be barely noticeable on a character accustomed to melting into his environment. In a digital world overrun by heavy reliance on CGI, she buried herself in past practical Star Wars projects so as to better understand what worked, why it worked, how it was made, and the ways in which it might birth something entirely new and yet recognizable.
She pondered. She fed her dawns of creation.
The creative community's response to Letter to Artists continues to breathe with a sense of “...Finally.” Somebody with high spiritual authority in the earthbound realm said it, and set it down in the Vatican archives. St. John Paul the Great separated an angst-fuleled hobby from a life’s calling, and he respected it as a vocation. Finally. Finally.
Nowhere did Shawna Trpcic express this more fully than in her work on the armor of the main character in The Mandalorian. Even if you don’t know a Star Destroyer from a Baby Yoda, you have seen this man, if only on branded hand sanitizer bottles in the grocery store. But what you were likely looking at was the second version of Mando’s (we call him Mando) outer dressing.
In the beginning of the series, this was a character whose language was methodical violence, a man barely clinging to his humanity. Mando had the same flicker as Shawna and the other artists the Holy Father mentioned, but his light was on its way out rather than on its way in. He did not foster creation. His bounty hunter’s soul was instead nearly extinguished. How was Shawna Trpcic to communicate all this in a glance?
She made her main character a mess, that’s what she did. He was a knight ever fighting himself, scraping through a numb existence. And his armor showed it– it was battered, mismatched, and dinged, some of it obviously lifted from former bounties. At one point parts of it were bound to his body with cloth ties, the rest of it pasted together with his stubbornness and a fair hand at soldering an arm plate while the arm in it was still bleeding. It wasn’t pretty.
And that is where Shanwa Trpcic laid in her most beautiful work.
After meeting his adopted son, Mando undergoes a spiritual transformation that's boldly expressed through newly forged armor. That is the shiny silver suit you see in the toothpaste aisle. Trpcic signaled that Mando had entered a new life even before he fully unearthed the compassion and moral sensitivity he'd laid to rest. His changed exterior is a reflection of the divine re-ignition always waiting for us… if we trust it.
Mando looked like he had his life more in order because he did have his life more in order. His morals were slowly re-aligning with the man he is called to be.
The costume continues to shift as Mando does. He begins to shoulder a soft cloth bag so his tiny son need never leave his side. A family signet is added to denote that he was no longer a man resenting his loneliness, yet fiercely protecting it all the same. These items were collected gradually, but with every evolution, Trpcic elegantly and efficiently indicated the forward motion of his character.
This is but a single example of her work– one visual story of one character in one program. And maybe I’m just a fangirl reading far too much into a sci-fi costume. But if, as the Holy Father says, “(w)orks of art speak of their authors; they enable us to know their inner life, and they reveal the original contribution which artists offer to the history of culture,” then Shawna Trpcic, herself a lovely creation, had an awful lot to say.
Mary Beth is a writer, public speaker, and educator in Cincinnati, OH. She covers Star Wars, baseball, hippopotamus love triangles, and much more.
