Tales from the Borderlands Costume

Mangoloo = Fiona (lady in red hat)
Labinnak = Rhys (in the black vest)
Mike = Vaughtn (shirtless)

Our costumes are based off the characters from the new video-game, Tales from the Borderlands! Our love for these characters inspired us to make these costumes entirely from scratch!

Let's start with Rhys costume which is worn by Labinnak. Believe it or not... this is the first time that Labinnak tried cross-playing (a female dressing who chooses to dress as a male character). The reasoning behind choosing this character was Rhys's personality. In the videogame Rhys is a businessman just trying to climb the corporation ladder. In his attempt to become the big boss, we see behind his false confidence, how much of a easily afraid dork he really is.

We started constructing the blue collared shirt first with the long “infinity tie” (yes the tie is supposed to continue into his pants). We made a design choice to make sew the band of the shirt with red fabric to represent this tie. That way no matter how much Labinnak moved, the tie would stay centered and flat to the chest. It was interesting sewing the shirt together because it was a first time that we ever put together a business shirt! After the shirt was the vest. The vest pattern was drafted based on Labinnak’s measurements while taking in consideration how the vest was supposed to fit the character. Essentially the vest is black pleather and a liner sandwiching quilting batting, which gives the vest some dimension and makes the vest super comfy!). After construction we painted/drew in every single dot and hexagon before giving final touches of a hand cut foam logo for the fictional business and little rectangles at the bottom of the vest. Similarly to the striped side of the blue shirt, to the pants we had to carefully use a fabric pen to draw the pinstripes. The shoes we painted gray and used white and black pens to bring out each scale of the possibly ugly but fabulous snake alligator look-a-like shoes. Lastly the robotic arm…. that was made with worbla, craft foam, foam board, acrylic paints, LEDS, and a toilet paper roll. The full tutorial can be found here (progress pictures included)!

https://labinnak.tumblr.com/post/126475383714/guess-what-kiddos-we-finally-finished-the-rhys

Ok now onto Vaughn (shirtless costume worn by Mike). Imagine that one nerdy guy. Your thoughts are probably along the lines of small, intelligent, nice guy. Now imagine if that same nerdy guy was super buff! Thats who Vaughn is… the lovable nerd… with a 6 pack. While the costume seems simple with a lot of modifications (pants were celshaded, shoes covers were made, along with a watch and nerdy glasses). Mike made a much more difficult commitment to get as buff as Vaughn. He committed to doing a daily workout that worked on building up his muscles to fit the character. It took several months to get as swole as Vaughn (get it… “swole”? Super buff..)!

Lastly there is Fiona, who is worn by Mangoloo. Fiona is a sassy and stylish con artist with an extremely stylish outfit. Although this extremely stylish outfit also meant that there were going to be challenges. The first challenge was the custom fabric. The red geometric patterned fabric I made in photoshop then sent to a fabric printing company to have it printed on fabric. The jacket and vest was made from scratch. The pants are a combination of two pairs of paints put together and painted. The had is modified to be white instead of black. The wig we styled in a red weft of hair. Then of course the props. Our favorite prop for Fiona has to be the triangular rock piece called a vault key. This prop is made with nearly every kind of foam (styrofoam and craft foam core, EVA foam top and wonderflex exterior. Painted to look cracked (it is NOT actually cracked... the surface is smooth.. we just used painting techniques to make it look the way it does). We put turple LEDs into into the prop. Then used magnets to hold it together, which allows us to get inside to change the batteries for the LEDs as well as use for skits. (In the game this item is supposed to break so we try to reenact this scene by making this prop "breakable" and easily put back together with magnets.)