Superman

The only inspiration necessary for designing the Superman costume was the comic itself. The logistics of building a wrinkle-free, completely seamless costume was a different matter. It was an engineering challenge as much as a costume design, and I cared deeply about making it look as authentic as possible for the legions of Superman fans.

Samples were built as "works in progress” as we ironed out the kinks. It needed to be flexible enough to withstand complicated action sequences with absolutely no real-life lumps or bumps that would distract the audience from this iconic superhero.

Many new synthetic fabrics were just coming on to the market, including various forms of Lycra and spandex. We camera-tested every turquoise stretchy fabric in front of blue and green screens for the flying effects. Color and texture were crucial; it couldn’t be too blue or too green or my superhero would disappear and we’d only see his red cape, shorts, and boots.

The tights and shorts couldn’t look like a ballet dancer, so I built in a plastic protection shield normally used by boxers or footballers. The boots were handmade of the finest red leather, the zippers at the back carefully concealed by strips of Velcro. The Superman logo was probably one of the first logos to be embroidered on clothing.

I started prep approximately eleven months before shooting—before the actor had been cast and before we had a director. I worked with the Production Designer (John Barry), the Director of Photography (Geoffrey Unsworth), and the Special Effects Supervisor (Roy Field), and after several weeks of camera tests we eventually found the perfect fabric from a factory in a small village in Austria. It was dyed specially for the movie and I ordered hundreds of yards of it. This was long before the days of digital effects, and the testing of fabrics with different weights, applications, and mechanisms felt quite avant-garde and experimental.

Once Christopher Reeves was cast, the costume came to life. My design was produced in many iterations—one with a harness for flying with cables hooked through it, one with a mechanized cape. Wearing Lycra for extended periods of time caused Chris to sweat profusely and anti-perspirants brought him out in a terrible rash, so I had a team of people standing by on set with hairdryers to remove the dark patches. The rest is history.

—Yvonne Blake

Spider-Man

The truth is that before I got the job, I had never read a Spider-Man comic in my life. There was a lot of pressure to drag our hero into the twenty-first century and make him "super cool". We spent a lot of time testing different ideas, but the more we went away from that famous iconic image of Spider-Man in the comic, the less truthful it looked. The job was to put the icon, three-dimensionally, onto the screen.

It's a big enough conceit, in the first place, to ask an audience to believe that a nerdy boy from Queens supposedly built this suit in his bedroom. They had a lot of trouble finding the actor. Tobey Maguire was eventually cast. He is only five-feet, seven inches tall, so proportions and scale were very important. There are as many as five other stunt men who wear a suit and who all have to look like "Spidey".

The undersuit is a four-way stretch power net onto which is glued a series of muscle groups made of foam latex. These are subtle enough not to be noticed but hard enough to enhance the silhouette. These are customized for Tobey and each stuntman. There is also a vacuum-formed under-helmet so that profile and head shape remain consistent. The suit is made of Milliskin, a fabric long used in bra manufacture.

A computerized, anatomical design that configures to the musculature of the muscle suit is printed on the Milliskin and stretched over the undersuit. The handmade boots are built inside the suit, streamlining the leg. (Once you put a superhero into external boots he always looks clumpy). Over the suit is a foam latex web created with the precision of a C.T.C. laser-cut mold. This web is then laboriously trimmed, painted, and glued by hand onto the suit. This process alone takes eighty hours. For Spider-Man III we made forty-two suits.

The eye lenses and frames are removable and stuntmen are able to work for up to four hours in the suit with out too much discomfort. I'm not going to tell you how he gets into it. Much work on this costume was done by the brilliant people at Frontline Design, Los Angeles, California.

—James Acheson

Catwoman

We had to justify the catsuit. Where did the Selina Hasting (Kyle) character get it? So we (Mary Vogt and I) discussed with the Tim Burton idea of shooting a scene were she made it herself out of a shiny black raincoat and used her sewing kit to make the claws. The scene works well in the film and has charm and is quite amusing.

I felt from the start that the catsuit had to be sexy but not trashy or cheap. It had to be classy. Black, shiny fetish clothing can very easily slip into the sleaze/porn world and this, after all, was a film for family viewing.

We tried to give the suit a playful, kittenish quality while still retaining a sleek, sexy appeal. The rough white home-made stitches on the shiny black suit were whimsical yet helped elevate the design by giving it an abstract graphic art quality. The whole design presented the head and face and the only colour in the costume is on the lips.

The makeup reinforced the monochrome black-and-white concept of the design, which was punctuated by the bright red lips, adding hugely to the impact. This was helped a great deal by the casting of Michelle Pfeiffer. She played the character with a refinement and wit that helped keep the design wholesome and playful, yet still remaining extremely sexy without becoming vulgar.

—Bob Ringwood

My work on the Catwoman costume for Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, began by sorting through Syren Couture’s Archives to see what I could find from our work on Batman Returns. I was able to locate several detailed drawings, which mapped the location of each of the individual cast-rubber sets of "stitches” on the costume; a critical piece of information for the re-creation. Bob Ringwood, the costume designer, was nice enough to send several high-resolution photographs of the costume for reference. The Warner Brothers Archive was very helpful by allowing me access to the original Catwoman costumes to take extensive measurements and photographs of the original suits.

A new pattern was created using all of these resources, but to get the proper fit, draping directly on the mannequin was the best solution. Each pattern piece was then cut from garment-quality rubber sheeting which we import from England. Since rubber will tear easily if sewn, we use a custom-formulated glue to hold the seams together. I made several prototypes of the costume, making adjustments of the fit while each was still on the mannequin. When the basic rubber suit had been perfected, it was time for the final touches.

—Jeff Gent, Syren Couture

Ironman

The challenge in designing a costume such as Ironman is that it has to serve two masters. First and foremost, in order for the film to work, the audience's disbelief must be suspended. The suit must be a convincing technological artifact: a wearable airplane, a powered suit of armor. Every detail must seem carefully thought out and evoke our experience of functional technology. You must believe this could be built and fly.

At the same time, once Tony Stark dons the costume he cannot simply be a man in a metal suit. He must become another character entirely, with his own identity, his own personality. Ironman must look every part the hero. The design must be a simple iconic gesture, human enough to become superhuman. The forms must convey mechanical athleticism, denoting muscularity and potency while seeming to serve aerodynamics and articulation. Shoulder blades become ailerons, serratus muscles become venting louvers. It should feel as if the shape mimics the human body and a sports car in equal parts—not as a means to manipulate perception, but as the inevitable product of some artificial evolution.

—Phil Saunders

Iron Man is a unique challenge in the superhero world because he is, depending on how you choose to look at it, both a superhero in the traditional sense, and a technological device based on science rather than superpowers. That is more true today than ever before because a lot of today’s technology is catching up to the science-fiction Iron Man is based on; while he was once a far-fetched fantastical idea, today he is a believable possibility. In designing the character, as well as his villains, I chose to look at it from a technological perspective and let a level of practicality dictate the aesthetics. The difficult part is that he still has to be a superheroic icon in the true Marvel fashion, so the challenge was to keep the larger-than-life, elegant silhouette and color scheme, which makes him instantly recognizable and which dates to the 1960s, and makes him as iconic as Spider-Man or Captain America, but update it for the current times. The biggest inspirations for my vision of Iron Man were the modern jet-fighters and sports cars with their active aerodynamics, various flaps, winglets, etc., which add a level of believability and practicality, but allow the design to maintain an elegance, much like those machines—an outer skin hiding a whole array of devices.

Iron Man Mark 2 and 3 were a collaboration between the designer Phil Saunders and myself, and our various strengths combined to create what I believe to be a very successful manifestation of that practical superhero idea. The suit in the movie is, for all intents and purposes, as much of a wearable aircraft as a superhero outfit. It maintains all of the key features Iron Man possesses in comics, but adds a huge level of detail and technology which makes him be as believable in motion on the cinema screens as he is.

—Adi Granov

Mystique

For the Film The X-Men

Moving away from Mystique's comic book interpretation and her being nude made design both challenging and fun, while offering the opportunity to pioneer a number of new technologies. Like a fabric, the majority of the prosthetic appliances were made flat, rather than from moulds of her body, as is the norm. We custom-designed materials to allow the flat appliance to stretch over the compound curves of her body, move with it, and stay without the use of glue. Intrinsically colored, they needed no topical coloration and were reusable. Only her exposed skin needed to be painted.

—Gordon Smith

Thirty-one pieces of the platinum silicone appliances in varying levels of plasticity were created to cover Rebecca Romijn. It took two artists seventy-eight hours, or two weeks, to create one set of appliances. Over fourteen full sets were assembled for Romjin and her stunt double. The application was accomplished utilizing a crew of five makeup artists. After the silicone pieces were applied, Romijn was moved into a spray booth and airbrushed with specially mixed paints. The look was then completed with the application of makeup to her eyes and lips. In the first two films, Romijn wore contact lenses, but in the third film her eyes were digitally enhanced. The entire application process took six hours.

—Robin Hatcher, Spectral Motion

For the Exhibition "Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy"

The mannequin was assembled with car bondo, sprayed with primer, and painted with a blue base color. Her eyes were then hand-painted and finished with a clear coat epoxy. Platinum silicone appliances in varying levels of plasticity were engineered to be self sticking, intrinsically colored and multilayered. Thirty-one pieces were created and applied to the mannequin with Telesis. Next, the hair was laid and punched onto the head. The final detail work was then airbrushed on to blend the silicone pieces with the mannequin.

—Robin Hatcher, Spectral Motion