BOUNTY HUNTING! A COMPLICATED PROFESSION.

Bounty hunting is a complicated profession. Dress to kill.

Set in a space western narrative, The Mandalorian’s armor sets had to withstand loads of gunfights and never ending duels with blasters, lightsabers and occasionally, the Darksaber. Eons before, there were a series of crusades taken on by Mandalorian warriors. These crusaders wore the armor in the conquest of their own world. They were later succeeded by the leader of the Mandalorian tribes, The Mandalores, before the events of the Skywalker Saga and the Mandalorian crusades’ first encounter against the ancient Sith.

As Karen Traviss says in her novel Star Wars Republic Commando: Triple Zero, “[a]rmor is simply a manifestation of an impenetrable, unassailable heart.” Similarly with the Mandalorians, their armor is a second skin to every warrior’s persona with aesthetics and technology suited to each individual and measured by the fighter.

The suits forged with the famous Mandalorian iron beskar are airtight and capable of being worn in environments with no atmosphere. The common components across crusader aesthetics was the layering of organic components such as fabrics, ceremonial bindings, animal bones and spiked hides.

When the Sith Lord, Ulic Qel-Droma, defeated the Mandalorians, the crusaders were drafted into the Great Sith War. The war came to an end about 4000 years before Star Wars: A New Hope. A new faction of crusaders called the Neo-Crusaders sprung to the scene.

The Neo-Crusader armor was not really a bespoke suit. It was highly standardized to usher in the new era and to keep a consistent look of the various species that would be welcomed into the Mandalorian culture, other than the original tribal factions. The suits were color coded based on Mandalorian ranks: gold for Field Marshals, silver for Frontline Veterans, scarlet for Rally Masters and blue for all the other Neo-Crusader ranks.

The visual conventions of Neo-Crusaders were profoundly visualized in the background of Star Wars’ latest. As much as it appears on The Clone Wars animated series. These Neo-Crusaders wore plain, rounded helmets like the Neo-Crusaders first seen in the Knights of the Old Republic games. They donned large robes that covered their armors from the neck down and flashed blades against the Jedi.

The standardization of Neo-Crusader armor came with variants influenced by the appeal of the Mandalorian armor’s traditional aesthetic. Heavily plated armor, fixed with external tubing and other vital elements became part of the Shock Troopers’ suit as featured in the Knights of the Old Republic comic series.

A Mandalorian wore it with pride as it offered protection from heavy weapons assault and functioned smoothly in air deprived voids for considerable time periods. War, in some strange and mysterious ways, brought peace.

The Mandalorian visual design took a giant leap to reflect the life and times they were in. The contemporary look and feel had been in sync with the mainline Star Wars movies and the prequels in particular. The long and extended civil war became a reason for the radical change in Mandalorian society.

The New Mandalorians were a faction who didn’t want to continue living their warrior past. Instead, they established a pacifistic, isolationist ideology helmed by a parliamentary monarchy. Kryze, one of the noble Mandalorian houses, led the New Mandalorian movement and upheld certain traditions of the Mandalorian armor but with a completely different aesthetic. There was no standing army. The New Mandalorian armor was designed for two different functions including the gray and lightly armored tunics worn by the peacekeeping force, known as the Mandalorian Guard, and the more elaborately decorated armored Royal

Guard that protected the Duchess, Satine Kryze. With a new era comes a new face. The most significant change in the design is where both the Mandalorian Guard and the Royal Guard dropped the classic T-Visor helmet that had been the identity of every Mandalorian for generations.

It was hard to keep the peace and quiet in a warring community. The New Mandalorian peace armor was worn by the extremist faction that adhered to the classical Mandalorian principles known as the Death Watch, a splinter faction who still believed in the traditional warrior culture of Mandalore. These designs are much more closely aligned with the Mandalorian armor worn by Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi and by his father in the prequel, Attack of the Clones.

The changes made by the Death Watch on this aesthetic are visually identical to the suits worn by Jango and then inherited by Boba. The clean look of Jango’s armor is replaced by Boba painting over it in his own color scheme to ascertain his identity.

The Death Watch brought about a unity in the look and feel with darker metallics and blue accents.

The end of The Clone Wars was a new beginning. Mandalore descended into turmoil. After a coup, spearheaded by elements of the Death Watch working with former Sith apprentice Maul and his criminal syndicate, the Shadow Collective had taken shape. Mandalorians who were loyal to Maul formed into Super Commando groups. Their armors stayed largely similar to the template worn by the Death Watch in the past. Its color palette was replaced with designs emulating Maul’s own black & red skin stripes and accompanying tattoos. Some warriors went the extra mile and modified their helmets with organic spikes, not as a tribute to the Crusaders, but to signify the bone protrusions on a Zabrak’s head, emulating their new master.

In an attempt to overthrow Maul’s coup and the life of Duchess Satine, the New Mandalorians petitioned the Republic in the final hours of The

Clone Wars. The Republic was successful. The execution of Order 66 and the perceived betrayal of the Jedi Order led to its rapid transformation into the Galactic Empire, and Mandalore quickly became occupied Imperial territory. The Imperial regime and Mandalorian collaborators controlled the power.

The Death Watch and the Shadow Collective maintained the Super Commandos as a fighting force, only this time with new and specialized armor.

Inspired by real-life alternate concept art for Boba Fett from Empire Strikes Back, the Imperial Super Commando design bore an uncanny resemblance to the armor of the Clone Army. The sharp angular chest pieces and a predominantly white color scheme with smaller jetpacks. Their helmets largely remained the same, except for the addition of two small sets of antennae on either side of the helmet.

Post liberation, information was lost in translation. What is known is that at some point, the Galactic Empire struck back at Mandalore, initiating a period of occupation and apparent genocide known among surviving Mandalorians as the Great Purge.

The Great Purge was devastating, and it was of varying degrees among surviving Mandalorians. They scattered into individual nomadic tribes and enclaves across the galaxy, intending to keep the true scale of survivors unknown on a galactic level. At least some of these enclaves returned to the more traditional armor designs that preceded the New Mandalorians’ cultural prominence.

The insistence of keeping the helmet on under any given circumstance gave the armor a whole new meaning. It was more than just armor. It was an extension of the warrior’s persona. Individual Mandalorians would customize the overall look and coloration of their armor as well as eventually imprinting it with the mark of their own clan. The singular and consistent trait seen so far in Star Wars’ exploration of this period was the practice of an individual ‘earning’ a full suit of beskar-crafted armor by exchanging plasteel armor pieces for newly forged plates, once they had found a way to retrieve the now rarer Mandalorian iron to give to an enclave’s armorer.

“Beskar has such remarkable strength because of both its natural properties and Mandalorian metalworking techniques,” Traviss writes in her novel Star Wars Republic Commando: Triple Zero. The Armorer (Emily Swallow) remembers how the rare metal could be mined only on their home planet of Mandalore and was likely stolen during the Great Purge.

A Mandalorian’s armor is as unique as their fingerprints. Passed down through generations, armor is a defining trait of the Mandalorian people and their culture. It’s definitely one of their most recognizable attributes.