"Nothing is true"

My big project for the summer is to make three Assassin’s Creed costumes. I sometimes sew presents for my cousin and this was his choice. As I have considered making one for myself, and every-so-often my dad mentions that he would like one, I decided that if I was going to make one assassin costume I may as well make three.

Left to right: Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, Revelations.

Of course, we have all chosen outfits from different games – making the same outfit three times would be far too straight forward. I have chosen the outfit from Assassin’s Creed II, my dad’s will be from Brotherhood and my cousin’s from Revelations. As much as I can I will try to make them historically accurate, but for the most part the game designs just aren’t true to history and it is more important to me that my costumes be screen accurate.

The outfits are all made of many layers so I needed to carefully analyse the illustrations to work out how many individual garments I would need and which pieces would be sewn to where.

The AC II outfit has a shirt and tunic. The tunic will have a waist seam (to be hidden by the sash) to which all the skirt layers will be sewn. It has two layers of sleeve caps – one slashed and one not.  It took me a while to work out how the various layers worked to get two collars and a hood. I concluded that the hood is a separate piece which is buttoned on under the collar.

The hood looks like a separate piece from the back.

The other two outfits were busier visually so I did the analyses by tracing over pictures in Gimp. The images I used are these screenshots from the game. I also referenced some promotional images. The costumes in the promotional material are not entirely true to what appears in the game which allowed me a bit of choice about how to do things. Having a choice is both helpful and unhelpful.

The Brotherhood outfit has a shirt, a jerkin and a doublet. It has a separate hood as well.

The bottom row is all the jerkin.

The Revelations outfit has a jerkin and doublet but no shirt. Really there probably would have been a shirt worn with it but there isn’t one visible and I don’t need another thing to make and my cousin doesn’t need another layer to wear on a hot day.

The green layer is the doublet, the other pieces are all parts of the jerkin. The red layer is beneath the purple layer in the front and on top of the purple layer in the back.

I suspect I am not using true meanings of ‘doublet’ and ‘jerkin’, but for this project I have assigned them to have the meanings: doublet - ‘sleeveless skirtless outer layer’ and jerkin - ‘sleeved, skirted underlayer’, so I can keep everything straight in my head. At this point I am not planning to make any of the metal or leather pieces.

Assassin’s Creed belongs to Ubisoft.