Jupiter Ascending is a wonderful movie, one of my favorites. If you haven’t seen it yet ignore the negative reviews and go watch it now, trust me. Now, seriously go.
Ok now that you have seen it, amazing right? I’m not going to get into my treatise on why Jupiter Ascending is such a great movie and yet so poorly received, maybe later. But simply from a design perspective the movie was breathtaking, incredible details that brought to life a complex and visually stunning universe. Every costume made me squeal a little with joy, these are the sorts of designs that make me wonder why I didn’t go into costuming after all; and then I remember that hand sewing millions of swarovski crystals can be a bit dull.
I was tempted to cosplay one of Jupiter’s insane ball gowns, but it was Caine Wise’s Skyjacker boots that convinced me; that and a strange desire to be a half albino space werewolf for a day. Caine Wise is one of the more understated costumes in the movie, it has that black futuristic practicalism – all black color pallet, accessories that serve a purpose but with weird materials and some odd construction (seriously who has a shirt with the closure on the shoulder?). Though not as gaudy as some, the simplicity is just a ruse and the costume designer in me was pretty excited to make his outfit.
Recreating any costume from a movie is always challenging without a million dollar budget and access to a professional costume shop. Caine is also the first genderbent cosplay I have done, and let’s be real here I do not have Channing Tatum’s physique. There were many difficulties to this build. To that end, for those looking to undertake a similar challenge, I’ve separate the costume out into three constructions posts: clothing, accessories and the boots.
There are only two major clothing pieces for Caine, the shirt and pants. I chose for the pants just to wear plain black jeans. If I had more time I would have taken said plain black jeans and added the leather knee pads to the front to match the details in the movie. But for this I chose to be lazy.
Shirt
The overview of constriction:
- Create the base shirt; plain front, patterned back.
- Add the textured detailing to the front of the shirt.
- Top stitch the decorative panels
- Detailing and finish edges
Easy right?
The basic shirt was a sleeveless princess seam construction designed to be fairly slim fitting, with a zipper in the back (I was not going to mess with the weird shoulder contraption). I used a plain black stretch denim from Joann for the front and the flocked black denim for the back. There is a geometric pattern on the back of Caine’s shirt, it looks most likely like a vinyl printed pattern on the back. I considered doing a custom print fabric, or this geometric pattern from mood fabrics, I settled on the one from Joann because it gave a similar feeling and was much cheaper than the other options.
The front texture was hand painted using tulip slick dimensional paint. I had originally thought I would directly replicate the pattern using the reference image of the 3D print (the actual shirt was made by 3D printing a mould and then casting latex). Replicating the design proved difficult so I simplified and randomized it into a pattern of random straight lines and occasionally solid blocks. I also saw this technique from loloswardrobe where the pattern was cut out from a layer of pleather which would be a nice alternative.
The diagram below shows the panels that I then added onto the shirt through creative top stitching, the main ones are the u-shaped panels on the back the zig zag on the sides. And there triangles around the neckline and one the goes around the arm pit. After the that most the seams were left raw and stitched close to to prevent extreme fraying.
The overlay stripe details were added with strips of painted EVA craft foam over the top. The belt was sewn on after the completed construction, I debated if this was an actual belt of connected to the shirt, I chose to connect it and am still not sure of the movie version is constructed. I glued on one of the square cast sections that I had made for the holster (detailed in the accessories post), and added some more dimension paint to tie it together.
