I have a few additional observations about these enlisted jumpsuits that didn’t seem to fit into the main body of my analysis.
First, in ST4 this lady wore her belt wrapped around the entire jumpsuit (including the back panel), instead of threading it underneath the back panel.
Also in ST4, the enlisted lady on the Federation Council wore a jumpsuit with a pocket that appeared to be made from a different, slightly lighter (and bluer) spandex.
In ST6, there was a publicity photo in which the two enlisted assassins appeared to be stalking Scotty in the corridor as he carried the incriminating engineering radiation suit he’d found, although there was no such scene in the actual movie.
And finally, in the TNG episode, “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” we saw that a few decades after ST6, enlisted crew members had stopped wearing the chest badges.
They’d also stopped wearing the ST6/GEN name tags, although in production-verse they hadn’t actually been introduced yet. (ST6 was released almost two years after this episode originally aired.)
If you’d like to learn more about how the movie-era uniforms evolved into “The Lost Era” and transitioned into the TNG-era uniforms, check out this blog post and its corresponding video:
(It’s far more focused on the “monster maroons,” but you may still find it interesting.)
And finally, these enlisted jumpsuits were prominently featured throughout the “Starfleet Academy” video game by Interplay; however, they were incorrectly utilized as Starfleet cadet uniforms for the main characters.
Note that they didn’t even have the trainee red collar and cuffs, or the trainee red sleeve band with the division-colored stripe.
I’d believe that the enlisted uniforms became the cadet and/or trainee uniforms at some point during “The Lost Era” as the Starfleet uniforms evolved, but the game was set between ST5 and ST6, so even that head-canon goes out the window.
In any event, as seen in the video game, these uniforms had two unique characteristics:
First, the chest badges were usually worn slightly higher, on the beige yokes themselves rather than vertically centered over the yoke/body seams.
And second, the cadets wore “squeaks” on their collars.
It was never addressed or explained in the game, but I think this was probably intended to be a nod to how the TNG-era cadets wore elongated pips on their collars that indicated the current year of their Academy training.
(For context, the video game was released in 1997, several years after The Next Generation had ended.)
