New York Comic Con (NYCC) had fantasy-fueled fashion on full display this weekend, thanks to the Dungeons & Dragons: Call to Arms costume collection at Burgschneider’s booth.
Burgschneider, the company behind this officially licensed Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) collection, specializes in medieval wear. But Thomas “Beol” Miller, Chief Creative Officer at Burgschneider Group and Art Director for the Dungeons and Dragons: Call to Arms costume line, spoke to The Pop Insider about what distinguishes this collection from typical costume offerings fans might find elsewhere.
“We don’t really want to encourage people the idea of thinking of it as a complete costume,” he says. “We want people to think of it as a canvas.”
At NYCC, Burgschneider displayed four base costumes inspired by D&D characters, which are currently available for sale online: the Wizard, the Rogue, the Fighter, and the Cleric. Each base includes options for pieces in multiple colorways, such as battle skirts, capes, trousers, vests, and gaiters.
According to Miller, these aren’t your standard single-use cosplay garments. “These costumes are designed to be worn and used and abused,” he says. “They’re not meant to be things that are flimsy, light, and destroyable over one weekend at a con. We want you to be able to run around in the woods with your friends or sit at a table and spill something on it and it’s still going to be the same the next day.”
To achieve that goal, the costumes are all machine-washable and come in sizes small through 3XL. The base costumes are all also priced under $200.
The company also displayed accessories it plans to offer to enrich these base costumes, including pouches, wizards book belts, and weapons. The weapons are, of course, designed to be harmless. “The idea is you can bonk your boyfriend or your little sister with them and no one’s going to get hurt,” Miller says.
On the near horizon — think December and January — Burgschneider will release costumes for the Warlock, the Bard, the Monk, the Barbarian, the Sorcerer, the Paladin, and the Ranger, which were previewed at NYCC as well (pictured, top).
And just like the structured-yet-open gameplay of D&D, these costumes are meant to evoke a visual consensus and a consistent visual language, while still allowing an element of choose-your-own-adventure.
“One of the trickiest things about designing for a world like Dungeon & Dragons is that the idea that you and I have about what a warlock looks like may be completely different things,” Miller says. “But through a series of iterative design processes and a lot of research into what people really think about each of the classes, we were able to come up with something that we can all agree looks like what we expect it to, and just make it work for everybody individually and uniquely.”
