The Wolverine...Born a Mutant, turned Assassin and now part of the Uncanny X-Men.
The Wolverine Costume went through many changes throughout comic book history and it wasn't until the major motion picture that he would give up his traditional yellow tights for his more gritty, aggressive and ‘possibly’ more appropriate real world leather suit.
Designing this costume posed several problems because it was not your average leather biker outfit. Building it up from scratch certainly was not the concern, however the multiple sleeves and the inner foam muscle structure did pose a real dilemma.
Take a look a the chest area and you’ll notice the outline of a detailed pectoral muscle. The entire jacket has a built in muscle suit based on the same concept as used in the movie suits.
This high quality replica and functional costume features 4 different types of leather. Ranging from Suede to Cow hide, areas with slick no grain leather to other key areas with grain leather. Ribbed leather inserts, embroidered ’X’ logo on back of collar, multiple areas outlined in different colored ribbing and possibly the most complex sleeve design yet to be seen.
This jacket literally has 4 sleeves. It actually has one set of sleeves over the other. Complicated to engineer, difficult to construct but a very cool component to this Wolverine style jacket.
Look to the left and you’ll notice the gloved fingers slipping under one of the detailed straps on the outer sleeve.
Replica Pants complete with opening leather cod piece. The Pants posed a whole set of different problems from the jacket. Although there was no formed muscle padding inside of the pants, getting the side detail to fit properly onto the legs and the cod to work while still looking movie accurate once again proved quite the challenge. In the end however, our Canadian Hero now had his cool leather pants to match the jacket. Once again, dual ribbed details and NO shortcuts.
Pants also have the inner thighs done with heavy duty 4 way stretch spandex, padded up knee area and boot cut lower leg area.
The midsection of these replica Wolverine pants have an opening middle cod piece area that is fastened with velcro and held in place firmly by 2 hidden snaps. To get in and out of these pants the middle zipper is hidden under the cod piece. A very elaborate detail considering that the entire area is also surrounded by multiple areas of ribbed leather.
The third element to this leather costume are the gloves. Again, complex and as detailed as the rest of the suit. Same mustard ribbing detail on the outer trim surrounding the zipper, and black ribbing around the claw knuckle openings. Once again tricky to do considering that blades will have to align themselves up with the openings to create the illusion of them popping out from the wearers wrists.
The finger joints are ribbed accordingly completing the overall look of this highly detailed leather suit.
Once again, as in the case with the pants and jacket the gloves also feature different types of leather in their construction. Outer knuckle openings are detailed with suede.
With simple color interventions, unique and different looks can be obtained. Here we went from the mustard ribbing to a reflective blue detail.
No longer movie accurate but certainly an eye catcher just the same. Sometimes little changes like a color detail lead you to believe you’re looking at an entirely different item.
