Last year, I visited a costume shop near Paris in the process of recreating a White Walker’s costume from hit show Game of Thrones. If you can’t wait for next week’s episode of the new season 7 of GoT, have a look behind the seams of one of their most iconic costume… #WinterisHere

Behind the scenes : the Atelier “Les Vertugadins”

l’atelier les Vertugadins is a talented costume shop situated in the suburbs of Paris. They specialise in costumes for TV, theater, cinema, you, me…

The team in front of one of their project

One of their specialty is working with leather and this is used a lot in period dramas such as Game of Thrones. And not always how you would think…

This is a good example of their work. First you see a helmet, made of some kind of metal right? Well actually, it is cleverly treated leather. Don’t believe me? I didn’t either so I took it off the shelf. You feel at once the difference in weight. It is also warmer and softer.

The costume they were creating was not for the show but for a Greenpeace video (I’ll link it below). For those of you living on Mars, a White Walker is a half dead mean creature made of cold and intending on killing any human being it crosses path with. It looks like this:

You can see some Samuraï inspiration. The costume also needs to be light and comfortable.

Find the right materials

As bizarre as it may sound, the first layer of the costume use to be… a wedding dress. It was dyed unevenly to recreate that snowy, changing grey texture you can see on the picture below :

There is a great work of leather, composed of layers of thin trips of the material assembled criss-crossing to create the belt.

Best way to work with leather? With glue!

Those are the sleeves and gaiters:

And finally, the main body of the armure. The metallic effect is created by adding white on the black leather, to recreate the shimmer of metal. The leather is also thicker to be more rigid.