In another interview with The Art of Costume podcast, Larlarb expanded on the redesign, explaining that there are simple, practical reasons to change the original design. “When you design a thing like this for another body, another head, there are things that have to fit that person,” she said. “That person is still performing, and they need to embody this thing.”
Indeed, many of the changes to Darth Vader’s suit of armor in “Obi-Wan Kenobi” came about simply because Hayden Christensen is not David Prowse (for one thing, Christensen is six feet tall, while Prowse stood at six feet, six inches). As Larlarb said, it was never about saying “let’s just make [the suit] blue,” but instead, executing tweaks that the audience would hopefully never notice. “They were engineering changes,” she added. “We have different materials at our disposal, so we can make things lighter and more flexible.”
Historically, the Darth Vader suit is not unlike the Batman suit in that it is rather uncomfortable to wear and doesn’t allow for much mobility. As Larlarb pointed out, this is the first live-action Darth Vader that can properly lift up his arms. If you want to think of it in terms of canon, you could, as Larlarb explained, think of Vader as outgrowing his suit and adding new parts throughout the years (which makes sense, considering how often his helmet apparently breaks). And it’s worth noting this is far from the first time the suit has changed between projects: Every single film has changed the Vader look in one way or another, most noticeably in the jump from the original “Star Wars” to “The Empire Strikes Back.”
