We first previewed the Anovos line of licensed replicas back in 2011 here at borg.com. Since then we’ve built their complete full-sized Star Wars original trilogy Stormtrooper kit and worn the company’s Star Trek: The Next Generation two-piece Starfleet uniform, and found their quality to be the top commercial products available. Anovos returned to San Diego Comic-Con this year with their most recent line of costumes and helmets and–as with the past products–the company continues to create the best replicas around.
For the most part these aren’t 100% the same designs and fabrics as the original screen-used pieces, but they come as close as most cosplayers will get access to. The exceptions are the armor kits and finalized sets of the Star Wars line, which are equal in quality to screen-used pieces, and even better quality in many cases. In the Star Trek line, despite using production-made pieces as a guide, the fabrics and color dyes don’t exactly match and some of the piping and trim is close to the original William Ware Theiss and Robert Blackman designs they are copying, but not dead-on, e.g., the Star Trek movie maroon uniform color is difficult to replicate and current fabrics used show wrinkles more than the expensive fabrics used by the studios years ago. Also, the blue dye used in the infamous “skants” is also a much lighter blue than original pieces and their appearance on the screen under production lights. It makes sense that Anovos creations for the more recent Abrams films and Star Trek Discovery series uniforms are closer to the real thing, as Anovos says it has worked with the studios in re-creating the most recent uniforms in both the Star Trek and Star Wars series, like this great command uniform from a design by Sanja Hayes for Star Trek Beyond:
The best bet is ordering currently in-stock costumes from the Anovos website. For costumes not yet available but sold on pre-order, Anovos has been known to take more than a year for delivery in the past, causing a history of canceled orders, despite warning customers about long projected delivery dates.
