One of the best ways to make a costume look more realistic is to weather it. We make costumes with brand-new materials, but they’re often meant to look old and worn, or at least lived-in. It makes a costume much more believable if it doesn’t look like it was just made.
So how do you weather a fabric costume? It basically involves speeding up the normal wear-and-tear that it would go through in real life. This includes fading, fraying, tearing, and discoloration in the right areas.
In this article I’ll go through 10 different techniques that you can use to weather your fabric costume. Some of them are more intense than others, so you can decide which best fits the level of wear that you need for your costume. I should add that I’m not a professional cosplayer or costume-maker, just a guy who does this for fun.
1. Bleach
Using a bit of bleach to wash your costume can be a good way to fade it quickly, but it can be tricky to get it right. If you use too much, the color can change too drastically. Some fabrics also have better resistance to fading, so it might not change very much. Other times bleach can turn your costume a strange color that you weren’t expecting.
To avoid any surprises, you can test how bleach will affect your costume by using it on a scrap piece of fabric of the same material. Simply mix a teaspoon of bleach into a cup of warm water and dab it onto the test fabric, then let it dry. If the color changes too much, or turns a color that you think won’t work well, then it’s probably better not to bleach your whole costume. However, if it simply fades the fabric a bit and makes it look older, then it could work well.
The exact amount of bleach you should use depends on your washing machine, but usually around a half of a cup is enough for most washing machines. Just add the bleach in with the water and laundry detergent before you put your costume into the machine, so that the bleach can fully mix into the water. This will prevent any concentrated bleach from coming into contact with your costume.
You can also use bleach to spot fade specific areas. Just take some diluted bleach and pour it onto the areas that you want to fade, then wash it all off. Or you can sprinkle or splatter it on to create random faded spots. Be careful that you don’t use undiluted bleach for this, as it could dissolve your fabric.
2. Washing and Drying
If bleach is too extreme for your costume, then you might want to just put it through some washing and drying cycles. This can give it a somewhat faded look, depending on how many times you wash it, but not as much as bleaching it. For some costumes that’s all you need. You can throw it in with your normal laundry to save water, but make sure that you wash it with similar colored clothes.
After you put your costume through the washer and dryer it will probably come out very wrinkled, unless you use some kind of product to prevent that. This is good for some costumes and gives it a very natural wrinkled look, as opposed to if you tried to do it yourself.
3. Sandpaper
If you think about it, clothes normally have some areas that wear out faster than others. Places like the hems of pants or skirts, the cuffs of sleeves, or around buttons and button-holes tend to be where a lot of friction occurs. Wherever clothes normally wear out, you can use sandpaper to distress the cloth.
If the character that you’re making the costume of wears any belts or straps across their clothes, then wherever those come into contact with the fabric would be an area that you could sand down a bit. If your character wears pants, then maybe the knee areas have gotten scraped or torn.
You can use any kind of abrasive material if you don’t have any sandpaper. Metal files, Scotch-Brite pads, steel wool, rocks, or anything else that has a rough texture that can be used to scratch up the fabric. You can even use something with a sharp edge like a knife or scissors to scrape the fabric, just be careful not to cut yourself.
4. Tea or Coffee
If you want to simulate stains from sweat or dirt, then you can use tea or coffee. Tea will usually stain fabric a bit lighter than coffee, but it depends on the concentration that you use. Just brew up some tea or coffee in either a cup or a pot, depending on how much you want to use. Then you can either pour the mixture over your garment in certain areas, or soak the whole thing at once.
This method works very well to make a white garment look old and stained, but it can also work on other colors. It’s good to test out a scrap piece of material first to see how the tea or coffee will affect it. Some materials stain easier than others. You might have to adjust the amount of time that you let the tea or coffee soak into the fabric before you rinse it out.
5. Paint
If your costume needs splotches of color that aren’t tea or coffee colored, then paint can work well. Maybe the costume you’re making is meant to look like it has spots of blood on it, or colorful stains. If that’s the case then paint is probably your best option. Just be very careful though, and maybe test out the paint on some scrap fabric, because it can be pretty permanent once it goes on. You should also test to see if it will stick to your fabric, or just easily peel off when it dries.
Spray paint is a good option if you want sort of a gradient effect. You can use it to color large areas of your costume, and you can easily control the amount of paint that goes on by changing the distance that you spray from. If you only want a light dusting of color, then hold the spray paint can far away and let a little bit of paint fall onto your costume at a time. Or you can hold it closer and get a much heavier coat of paint. Be careful not to hold the can too close to the costume though or the paint can build up too much and start to drip, unless you want that effect.
If you need to create splotches or splatter marks, then acrylic paint might work well. You can use it straight from the tube, or dilute it with water to make it as thick or as thin as you want. With this kind of paint you can brush it on, drip it on, or even splash it on to your costume.
For a blood stain effect, you can use red or brown paint. If the blood is supposed to look fresh then brighter red paint is good. However, if you want to make it look like it has old, dried blood stains, then mix some brown paint in with the red because blood turns to a darker brown color when it dries. You can even make the blood stain look darker toward the center and lighter as it gets to the edges to make it look more realistic.
6. Dirt
Sometimes the best way to make clothes look dirty is to use real dirt. It doesn’t get much more realistic than the real thing. There are a few different ways you can apply dirt to your costume. You could just put it on after a rainy day and walk through some mud puddles. This should splash some mud around the bottom of your costume, which is realistically where mud and dirt would gather.
If that’s not an option for you, then you could always collect some dirt from outside in a container and use that to apply to your costume. You can rub the dry dirt into the fabric, or add some water and stir it up to make a mud slurry, and then apply that. Keep in mind that a lot of dirt won’t stick to the fabric and will eventually just fall off, so be careful when transporting your costume after you use this method.
Sometimes dirt can leave fairly permanent stains, but other times it will just wash off. It can look very good while it lasts, but if you want a more permanent look, you might want to just paint it on.
7. Scissors
Scissors can be used to create a lot of different effects on fabric. Just be careful when using them so you don’t cut yourself.
If your costume needs to look like it was stabbed with a knife or sword, then you can use scissors to poke a hole through the cloth. You can also use them to recreate slash marks. If you want to go a step further, you can add some red or brown paint around the holes to simulate blood.
A lot of times, costumes need to look frayed or torn in certain areas, especially around the bottom of pants, skirts, or capes. You can use scissors to create this effect by cutting into the fabric in those areas at different angles. However, if you just leave it like that after cutting it, the cuts can look too clean to be convincing as old and tattered. After you cut the fabric, it helps to pull some of the strands of thread to make the cuts look more frayed, and more like tears in the cloth.
Scissors can also be used to make very small cuts in the fabric in certain areas to make it look like the fabric got caught on something like a branch, or thorns. Just make some small cuts in a cluster with the tip of the scissors, and it should look like a group of small holes from the costume getting caught on something. These small cuts can also be used in high-friction areas of the costume to make it look worn out.
8. Sunlight
If a sunny day comes around and you have the time to let your costume sit outside, then this can be a good method to achieve a natural-looking fade. Just hang your costume up or lay it out flat in a safe spot where it won’t get stolen, and let the sun do the work. Sunlight also has the added benefit of killing germs.
The problem with this method is that it can take a long time, sometimes multiple days even, to achieve the amount of fading that you want for your costume. It depends on the fabric that you used and how it was dyed. If you have the time and the weather is agreeable, then this is a good option. You also have to make sure to turn your costume around so that both sides get direct sunlight.
9. Burning
A lot of costumes need to look like they’ve sustained some fire damage, and the best way to achieve that look is to actually burn it. This can be tricky as a lot of modern fabrics are synthetic, and therefore won’t look very good if they burn. If you want to use this method, make sure that your costume is made of organic materials. Also, keep a fire extinguisher nearby and ready to go in case things get out of control.
To do this safely, I recommend you use as little heat as possible to create the desired effect. I don’t recommend using a lighter, as even a small open flame can sometimes be too much. I would use something like a wood-burning tool or a hot knife to char the fabric and make it look like it was burned, without actually setting it on fire.
If things do ignite, make sure to put it out immediately with water, which you should also have nearby. The last thing you want is for things to get out of control.
10. Actually Wearing It
Sometimes the best way to make something look authentically worn out is to actually wear it. If you have enough time, you can wear your costume while you do work around the house or in your yard. This will create natural creases and stretches in your costume, and if you wear it for long enough it should start to look genuinely distressed.
If you don’t have that much time, or if it’s just not distressing the costume enough for you, then you can use this method to determine where you can do more artificial wear-and-tear. After you wear it, pay attention to where any creases have formed, or where any areas of high friction were. Then you go over those areas with sandpaper or whatever method you want to make it look even more distressed. This will help give you an idea of how to make your costume look more realistically worn out.