I made three items for this costume: A long, black outer trenchcoat, a shorter, grey inner coat, and an Orbo gun prop. The real challenge of the inner coat was the weird shoulders, which have a very peculiar shape in the anime. Also, the knot buttons ended up taking me about ten hours to make, including experimenting with different techniques. That's a long time to make five lousy buttons. I am slow. I made finished pocket slashes, but no actual pockets. So if you put your hand into the pocket slash, you can reach my pants pocket. I didn't want real pockets, because then I would end up putting stuff in my pockets, which would weigh it down and make it less billowy. And long anime coats are always billowy.
The outer coat was pretty simple. I made a coat instead of using a long, black trenchcoat I already owned (I have two) because I wanted it to be accurate. This mostly came down to the placement of the seams and the vent flaps. I found some synthetic fabric which looks a little heavier than it is, then added material at the seams on the lower half of the coat, in order to make it more billowy. I didn't put any buttons on the outer coat because I couldn't see any buttons on it in the anime, and besides, he never closes his coat anyway.
The Orbo gun has an accurate profile shape, but I made it in about a day and a half out of foam core and paperclay, and it looks pretty cheap. Especially since the only paint I had on hand was a gloss black. I definitely need to redo this thing. I used a glow stick for the little bottle shape that sticks out the back. It's not accurate, but glowing stuff looks kewl.
I wore $5 hair extension with this costume. I was skeptical that it could be put into my hair and not look ridiculous, but Jaina Solo did a good job of making it both secure and natural-looking.
I bought my pendant from fantasyprops.com. I may, in the future, make my own in order to make it glow-stick-friendly.
United States