Spike Spiegel Jacket

This week’s project: Cowboy Beebop's Spike Spiegel

The now-owner of this jacket is the perfect person to cosplay Spike: Tall, lanky, charming, with a huge swath of dark hair. He knows this, he has been told this many times. In fact, he fits the look so well that he was told this when he was actively cosplaying a completely different character -

[paraphrased]

Attendee: OMG are you Spike?!

Friend: No, actually –

Attendee: OMG But you totally should be!

Friend: Well, I’m playing –

Attendee: but you look just like Spike!

Friend: Welp, ok. I’m cosplaying Spike cosplaying Vocaloids now I guess!

Obviously, he needed a Spike cosplay. The main problem was that the jacket Spike wears in Cowboy Beebop is, as anime costumes tend to be, fairly unique. It isn’t a regular suit jacket, but instead has a very large lapel with light blue lining. He wanted it to look accurate to the anime, but most of the custom made cosplays he’d seen were pretty cheesy. The giant lapel looks too bright and out of place, the jacket is ill fitted, something was always not quite right. The alternative was a not-accurate-to-the-anime standard suitcoat, which was not optimal. This is where I step in.

It was fairly obvious from looking at inspiration photos that the “suit jacket” was actually an open double breasted coat that would have a closure at the shoulder, but most of the other cosplays I’d seen simply extended the lapel, giving them a comedic/cartoonish look, which wasn’t at all what we were going for. There was also quite a bit of high contrast lining going on in other pieces, which totally makes sense if you copy the colors from the anime exactly. However, if you think about what animation does with color, it uses it to differentiate materials and textures. It made more sense for our purposes to use a lining that is closer in color to the shell fabric but with more reflectiveness, allowing the fabric’s texture and highlight to emphasize the color difference.

I ended up going with a poly wool blend for the shell, color matching an already-purchased pair of poly wool pants as well as possible, and a lightweight poly blend lining. I think it did a pretty good job of capturing the color contrast.

I built the jacket fully from scratch, although I had intended to use this pattern:

But I ended up making the pattern by hand. Because I am a masochist. Unfortunately I didn’t grab any photos of the pattern itself, but it was a fairly basic jacket with the left front reaching about 2/3 of the way across his body, and the right reaching up to his shoulder. It closes at the waist with an internal button as well as two hooks under the two decorative bands.

The most difficult part of this piece for me was getting the lapel to sit correctly at the corner with the lining. I may ask him to let me rework it a little bit, because as I’ve seen him wear it I’ve had thoughts on how to fix what I see as glaringly annoying errors.

But in the end the piece as a whole wasn’t too complicated, and I got it from measurements to completed garment in about three or four days total.

Just a few construction/in progress photos for your viewing pleasure: