Pattern cutting
The soft costume team draft and drape patterns for any situation, whether it’s an imposing superhero or delicate tailoring. Even canine co-stars are catered for! Precisely scaled versions are adapted for stunt performers and doubles.
Stretch & technical sportswear
A specialist skill essential for superhero and sci-fi costume, stretch construction requires careful manual and digital calculation of horizontal and vertical stretch variation and percentage reduction, sew-free bonding techniques and integration of workshop-fabricated components.
Fine tailoring
FBFX’s fine tailoring team uses traditional skills to produce fully tailored garments. Specialist cutters with a background in the fashion industry ensure every stitch and dart enhances movement and silhouette.
Surface design
Fabrics at FBFX are rarely used off the roll, but customised with specialist paint, foiling, dyeing, embroidery, breakdown, dimensional print, screen print and sublimation printing, as well as bespoke integrated moulded embellishments.
3D fabric printing
Dimensionally printed fabrics, also known as 3D printed fabrics, have become a huge part of specialty costume creation in recent years. FBFX has been making custom fabrics since 2019, with complex, one-of-a-kind prints produced for costumes including Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, Moon Knight and Supergirl.
Based around the skills of traditional screen printing, dimensional print creates not only pattern and colour but texture, depth and optical illusions that enhance character silhouette, working in tandem with muscle suits and costume paint FX. Made with action and stunt work in mind, FBFX’s dimensional print fabrics move and stretch with the performer.
The dimensional print team works closely with the digital department to build and finesse each design, often creating complex, costume-specific prints artworked with the help of computer cloth simulation. Variations and prototypes can be quickly produced for camera and lighting tests.
Supergirl
FBFX’s cloth simulation specialists take concept art to the next stage of production - a practical application of designs before anything is made.
Working closely with the pattern cutting, dimensional printing and hard surface teams, our specialists design complex placement artwork to ensure flawless print transition from one sewing pattern piece to another.
Digital rendering of fabric with CAD, using CLO3D and ZBrush, enables the creation of incredibly detailed, high definition, photo-real images with the ability to change lighting and colours. Designers are able to see an accurate representation of the finished costume - constructed on a 3D scan of the actor - and even export patterns, before a single thing has been made in real life. This not only saves time, but saves on materials for a more sustainable approach.
This allows for lines, components and colours to be checked on the performer, pre-empting and correcting issues with real-world application at the earliest opportunity. This not only brings clarity to the prototyping phase, but also hugely speeds up changes as projects develop, with digital models and data used in the production of final costumes.
Digital prototyping
Whether working as a standalone team or in partnership with other departments, FBFX’s soft costume specialists have the experience, skills and resources to bring designs to life without compromise.
Using traditional hand-sewing, digital cloth simulation and everything in between, they’ve fabricated some of film’s most recognisable costumes.
Fabric FX
FBFX’s specialist soft costume department launched in 2017, bringing together a multidisciplinary team specialising in sewing, pattern cutting, stretch construction, leatherwork and tailoring. The addition of the department, working in partnership with our workshop and digital divisions, allowed FBFX to produce every aspect of a costume.
Over the years, FBFX’s soft costume team has become known not just for its formidable cutting and sewing skills but also for R&D, fabric surface design and innovative bonding techniques that have helped change the face of costume construction. Fabric is dyed, dimensionally printed or painted in-house, rarely used off the roll, created to suit the exact requirements of the costume designer.
This approach has resulted in instantly recognisable costumes such as the iconic yellow Wolverine suit from Deadpool & Wolverine (costume design by Graham Churchyard and Mayes C Rubeo), a complex, wearable construction incorporating varying levels of stretch, internal structuring and silhouette-defining muscle layers, with stunt and hero versions.
The team is equally adept at creating more traditional soft costume builds, anything from a Regency jacket to modern military fatigues and futuristic spacewear.
In 2025, FBFX opened a new building dedicated to soft costume and dimensional printing, expanding capacity to take on specialist and traditional sewn work of any type.
Notable projects include Deadpool & Wolverine (2022), Supergirl (2026), Darth Vader (Obi-Wan Kenobi, 2022), Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (2025), Moon Knight (2022), Dune (2021), Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023), The Midnight Sky (2020), Star Trek Discovery (2017) and Halo (2022).