X-Men Movie Costumes

get some leather and an industrial sewing machine and go to work. Possibly get a seamstress or costume designer to help with the patterns

later
TOm

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What everyone seems to forget is that once we look past race, religion, gender, and all that, everyone on this planet is first and foremost...

...a PERSON

Costumes are created with any of the techniques that go into making high fashion clothing, but they also involve the use of less standard materials in the case of horror or sci-fi. For these you may have to employ unusual techniques, molded pieces, or even going to the extent where the costume is more of a full body prosthetic than clothing and is better accomplished with make up FX materials and techniques.

Leather isn't easy to work with - vinyl lookalike products are cheaper and easier to use. Latex rubber is available in large sheets and in many colors from companies such as xyz.

To get some effects, you have to resort to sculpting the costume pieces, making molds, and casting them using a variety of materials: liquid latex, foam rubber (hot/cold), vinyl, silicone, polyurethanes, etc.

Each of the various suggestions mentioned above are complex enough to require entire books to teach the pertinent procedures associated with them, sometimes several books are required just to get the basics.

The more time and experimentation and the more you are willing to take the time to learn, the better your costuming will be. Keep in mind that movie costumes are different from real world ones - you make a costume that looks cool but is too flimsy or uncomfortable to use in the real world. On a set, you open a costume to let in cool air or take a moment to replace a damaged costume or part of one. "Hero" suits are often made for stunt shots - more durable but less detailed versions of costume designed to take more abuse than ordinary.

I have run into the irritating demands of reality all to often when designing costumes for Haunted hoses or contests - you have to deal with the lack of breaks between takes and camera set ups - you can't take off every 15 minutes to adjust the outfit or fix it. The good thing about real life costumes is that you can get away with less detail or a somewhat inaccurate replica of a movie costume. People are impressed with seeing something cool with their own eyes mere feet or inches away (what I call the "Wow factor".) Perfectionists like to go for exact detail in their reproductions, but if it is meant to be worn to parties & other public events, the Wow factor covers a lot of things. It can be disheartening to noticxe that something clever but markedly less accurate than something you've made can recieve just as much reaction from people due to the Wow factor.

ALso remeber that film doesn't capture a fraction of the color variances (and thus detail) that the human eye can, so it is possible to fake a certain amount of detail work for film that wouldn't pass in real life. Anyone who has seen a display of items used in movies is usually suprised by how less realistic the props and costumes look to the eye than on the big screen.