The painful, problematic history of Princess Leia’s gold ‘slave’ bikini

Carrie Fisher hated wearing it, Star Wars fans and collectors have lusted after it, and feminists have reclaimed it. Why the costume drama?

At first, Carrie Fisher thought Princess Leia’s gold bikini was a joke. She famously hated the costume, which she wore in 1983’s Return of the Jedi, and which defined Princess Leia’s sex symbol status – a term that Fisher rejected. “When [George Lucas] showed me the outfit, I thought he was kidding and it made me very nervous,” she later said.
Fisher, who died in 2016, also recalled feeling under pressure from Lucas to get in shape. “He showed me sketches to frighten me into exercise, I think,” she said in a DVD commentary. “He succeeded.” 
Indeed, the iconic gold bikini left little to the imagination, even by the primitive standards of the desert world Tatooine. “If you stood behind me, you could see straight to Florida,” she recalled about the costume. “You’ll have to ask Boba Fett about that.” 
The costume sold at auction last Friday for more than £130,000 – a sum big enough to create a great disturbance in the force. Though a reasonable price, perhaps, for owning the hottest garment in the galaxy. The seven-piece costume – comprising a bikini brassiere, bikini plates, hip rings, an armlet, and bracelet – sold at Heritage Auctions in Dallas for a grand total of $175,000 (£136,129).   
The gold bikini crossed over into the cultural consciousness as a persistent fantasy – an idea given new life in the 1990s, when Ross asked Rachel to wear it in an episode of Friends – but it has a somewhat problematic history. Not least as a symbol of the original Star Wars trilogy’s most troubling moment: Jabba the Hutt, the slug-like crime lord, capturing Leia and forcing her into the bikini as part of his multi-species harem. The unspoken ickiness is that Jabba, we assume, plans to somehow keep Leia as a sex slave.
The bikini was previously known as the “slave Leia” costume – one of several old terms consigned to the space bin – and, as Fisher described herself, “what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of hell”.  
The bikini lived on in fandom as a controversy-riling hot button and a feminist talking point, though there have been efforts in recent years to reclaim the bikini as a symbol of Leia’s power. Lest we forget, Leia chokes Jabba the Hutt to death while wearing it.  
Star Wars creator George Lucas had specifically requested the costume for Return of the Jedi, the last film of the original trilogy. The bikini was sketched by costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers, with input from Nilo Rodis-Jamero, and made by sculptor Richard Miller.  
Richard Miller, speaking on a behind-the-scenes retrospective, remembered that George Lucas told him, “We want to show that Princess Leia is growing up”, which sounds uncomfortable now. “She got mature [over the course of the trilogy] and that’s why the slave costume was introduced,” added Miller.  
Lucas described what he wanted to Aggie Guerard Rodgers. “His eyes started sparkling when we talked about it,” Rodgers told Wired. Lucas pointed Rodgers to the work of fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, who certainly liked to paint a curvaceous, bikini-clad warrior-ess.  
Fisher had, it’s true, been sexualised since the first Star Wars in 1977. She later told an anecdote about how Lucas said she couldn’t wear a bra under her original costume “because there’s no underwear in space”. 
Talking to NPR in 2015, Carrie Fisher explained that the gold bikini was very much not her choice. “I had to sit very straight because I couldn’t have lines on my sides, like little creases,” she recalled. “No creases were allowed, so I had to sit very, very rigid straight.”   
There were different versions of the bikini, including a hard metal version for regular scenes and a rubber version for action scenes (worn by stuntwoman Tracey Eddon). The bikini also had a leather lining to stop it chafing Fisher’s body. “However, she still didn’t like it,” said Richard Miller. “I don’t blame her.”  
In the 2016 book, The Princess Diarist, Fisher poked fun at the fact the bikini had, in the storyline at least, been selected by Jabba himself. “Jabba the Hutt – the fashionista,” Fisher wrote. “Jabba the Hutt – the Coco Chanel of intergalactic style. Trendsetter, fashion maven, leader of women’s looks in his world, on his planet and the next.”  
It was such a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, perhaps, that issues of sexism and the male gaze hadn’t quite reached the desert planet of Tatooine. To underline just how objectified Leia was in the bikini, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo don’t even speak to her when Luke comes to her rescue at Jabba’s palace – she just sits there while the men (and slug) talk business.  
“So as they were being led off, I said, in the rehearsal, ‘Don’t worry about me! I’ll be fine! Seriously!’” Fisher told NPR. “Which I thought they should’ve kept in there.” Leia did at least get to kill Jabba in retaliation, which Fisher described as “my favorite moment in my own personal film history”.  
“What redeems it is I get to kill him, which was so enjoyable,” she said. “I sawed his neck off with that chain that I killed him with. I really relished that because I hated wearing that outfit and sitting there rigid straight, and I couldn’t wait to kill him.”  
According to Aggie Guerard Rodgers, the bikini went down well during production – “Most of the crew are men and they really enjoyed being on the set,” she told Wired – though elsewhere Rodgers has said it wasn’t meant to be overtly sexual.   
“When you look at it, she’s completely covered up,” said Rodgers in 2023. “She had a lovely figure then, as we all did then. There was never any discussion of lasciviousness at all. There was no deep cleavage showing. I’m kind of that way myself. I’m kind of square in that way. But it still was a bikini. It’s not Brigitte Bardot, let’s say that.”  
Fisher herself defended the bikini at the time. “[Leia] has no friends, no family,” she told Rolling Stone in 1983. “Her planet was blown up in seconds – along with her hairdresser – so all she has is a cause. From the first [Star Wars], she was just a soldier, front line and centre. The only way they knew to make the character strong was to make her angry. In Return of the Jedi, she gets to be more feminine, more supportive, more affectionate. But let’s not forget that these movies are basically boys’ fantasies. So the other way they made her more female in this one was to have her take off her clothes.”  
Star Wars fans certainly saw the sexy side. Fisher wore it for a famous beach photoshoot for Rolling Stone magazine, and homemade versions of the bikini quickly showed up at science fiction conventions. It remains a popular cosplay piece – Fisher especially liked seeing men turn up to conventions wearing it.  
But the gold bikini symbolised not only Star Wars’ sexual awakening, but a debate over objectification in science fiction and the deeper meaning of her character’s journey – from headstrong leader of the Rebellion to being paraded around like a piece of meat for the good of her man (Han Solo, whom she’s trying to rescue at the time). 
Comedian and podcaster Adam Buxton interviewed his five-year-old daughter about her thoughts on the issue. Buxton’s daughter called Leia’s slave outfit “a pretty good look for her”. Her suggestion was to escape from slavery but “just keep on wearing [the bikini]”. 
The controversy flared up in 2015, when a father complained about a slave Leia action figure on sale for kids. Fisher, talking to The Wall Street Journal, advised the father should tell his daughters that “a giant slug captured me and forced me to wear that stupid outfit, and then I killed him because I didn’t like it. And then I took it off. Backstage.” 
Reports followed that Disney, which owns LucasFilm, would phase out the slave Leia outfit from its merchandise and marketing. Disney has certainly made efforts to clean up other parts of the galaxy. For instance, Boba Fett’s ship, the Slave One, has been rebranded as “Firespray”. Fisher said the debate around the slave Leia merchandise was “stupid”. Though when Star Wars relaunched that same year with The Force Awakens, Fisher also warned new star Daisy Ridley to now allow herself to be made a sex symbol. “You should fight for your outfit,” she told Ridley in Interview magazine. “Don’t be a slave like I was. You keep fighting against that slave outfit.”  
Slave Leia figures weren’t sold as part of the original Star Wars toy line. They weren’t produced until 1997 – the age of laddism. In 2014, there were reports that Princess Leia toys were hard to find in major retailers – any Princess Leia toys, let alone the slave gold bikini version. 
The only available Princess Leia toy at @ToysRUs is of her in a “Slave Outfit” http://t.co/4KNoMiXYBz #NotBuyingIt pic.twitter.com/rnV5NB0J9g
The argument for keeping the slave Leia bikini is that it’s part of Star Wars’ history and that, in context, it’s Leia at her most powerful – or that its performative wokeness for the sake of marketing from Disney. A feminist-baiting spin by the writer Lizzie Finnegan argued that the gold bikini says “don’t underestimate women” and “Slave Leia, AKA Jabba-Killing-Leia, was one of the earliest examples of a TRUE feminist icon represented in media.” 
LucasFilm president Kathleen Kennedy, speaking to Vanity Fair in 2016, denied that the slave costume was banned or being phased out (it’s since been featured in Star Wars animated shows and a Star Wars video game). Kennedy said she didn’t think George Lucas would put Leia in the bikini if Return of the Jedi was made now. Though Mellody Hobson, Lucas’s wife, disagreed. “George is not apologetic about that bikini,” Hobson said. “He thinks that was a very important scene. He would probably do the same thing today. He is not apologetic at all.” 
I know that during my days as a comic book shop manager, a certain type of fan bought slave Leia merchandise – men whose formative years were deeply affected by the gold bikini. 
But the bikini has been reclaimed for more enlightened times, particularly by the empowering Princess Leia novel, Bloodline by Claudia Gray, published in 2016. Leia’s gold bikini guise is no longer known as “slave Leia”, but the princess-doing-it-for-herself moniker, “Huttslayer”.  
“Right around when I was working on this part of the book there was a movement that went around in some Star Wars fan circles – a lot of talk about how much people don’t like the ‘slave Leia’ outfit,” Gray told Entertainment Weekly. “That’s her most powerless moment in the entire thing.” 
It’s a progressive, positive leap forward for the galaxy far, far away, no doubt, but the bikini’s original intention is still clear. As Richard Miller said: “It was a slave costume and it was supposed to be skimpy.”