How The Thing Wound Up a Menswear God in ‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’

Marvel, thankfully, has a hefty development budget, which allowed Pristine to invest time and money into her fabric and color research. “I could sample quite a few yarns to see what worked best, what had the stretch we needed, and what looked best on screen. For that, I worked a lot with Italian mills like Filati Be.Mi.Va—companies that have long histories with fine gauge knitwear.”

The team fabricated 90 suits in total, around 30 for each human character—as well as the mini supersuit for baby Franklin Richards at the end of the film. (“With its little booties!” says Pristine.) The knitter also made some civilian clothes for First Step’s surprising menswear MVP: The Thing, Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s motion-captured man mountain. “Because you can’t source knitwear that big,” she says, “I made some massive V-necks, which a cutter gave us the pattern for.”

Milliner Jen Lewis, meanwhile, received a gigantic 3D model of The Thing’s head to craft his enormous brown felt trilby and Brooklyn Dodgers baseball cap. also received a pattern for The Thing but in 3D form. “The Thing is CG,” says Lewis, “but we still need to make the [physical] costumes, so when it crosses over to [the visual effects] department, they can put them in.”

Courtesy of Jen Lewis

Courtesy of Jen Lewis

Byrne explains that there is “no locked-off recipe” for digitizing practical clothes in film. “We made all of the clothes for The Thing, and we had an articulated form that we dressed on-set, so everything was there in-camera. And the model was also scanned on-set so they had a digital file. But then it goes to post-production and decisions of what elements they use are made there. It’s always a mixture.”

British clothiers Taillour also created a couple of custom pieces for The Thing and were similarly sent a 3D model of his frame to work on. But Byrne credits her “very talented” cutter, Soizic Quentin de Coupigny, with making most of the large-scale suiting look realistic. “The way Soizic described making clothes for The Thing, even down to his shirts,” Byrne says, “was that you had to throw out everything you already knew about cutting and start afresh. Because of his shape, we had to have lots of darts and seams in places we normally wouldn’t, so I’d been sticking to a lot of plain fabric to hide them.” But Byrne ultimately couldn’t resist making The Thing a plaid jacket from “this amazing fabric I found,” she says. “I was worried it would end up a mass of diagonal checks and weird angles, but Soizic made it work. It’s a work of genius.”

Courtesy of Taillour

Courtesy of Taillour

The Thing has the greatest menswear hits of the movie. Aside from his red plaid jacket, there’s a cool cornflower crewneck tucked into a pair of slim buckle-belted selvedge jeans, a classic two-tone gab jacket, a houndstooth sweater vest, and a slim-cuffed collection of rock-bod baggy shirts. But the best piece in his wardrobe? A pair of enormous, heavy-stepping Red Wing boots.

“I think Reed found a cobbler and said: ‘Look, he loves these shoes, please make him a pair,’” says Byrne. “Because, with The Thing, you realize that the way his hands work would make it really difficult for him to do up shoelaces or buttons. So we had to think about how Reed would have created or found something that worked for him. Really, you could make a whole film just about what The Thing wears and how he gets dressed.”

Now there’s a menswear movie we’d watch. We just hope that, with the Fantastic Four set to join the MCU proper in next year’s Avengers: Doomsday, they don’t lose the righteous retro threads that made this first outing so stylish.