Without visible faces, “they became a total army,” Clapton said – but the design had unintended consequences on the cast. They wanted armor that “no matter who you put on it would create the same strength” and finally settled on a variation of what Martin describes in the books: wrapped plate and a helm with a curved point and a mask-like face. For Jaime Lannister’s golden hand, Clapton designed it thinking of the woman who gave it to him – his sister and lover, Cersei, who would want him to have a hand that “looked like it wanted to caress” and whose beauty hides the deformity that she sees of his arm.įor the Unsullied, the eunuch warriors of Essos, Clapton said she faced a different challenge. For Joffrey Baratheon, a spoiled boy who never fights his kingdom’s battles, ornate, gold lions and “hardly aged at all, because he doesn’t use his armor very much”. Her team not only makes armor but breaks it down, ages it and patterns it, cherrypicking historical references and tailoring every detail to match the story of its bearer.įor Theon Greyjoy, for instance, Clapton and her team slashed the sigil of the kraken on to his armor to reflect his homeland’s vicious culture, waxed its leather because of his island origins – and to give it the look of something soaked in fish oil. Just as George RR Martin crafts baroquely detailed worlds in the novels adapted for HBO’s most popular show, Clapton described how making the armor of Game of Thrones requires a meticulous attention to subtleties of history and character. An unlikely trio met on Tuesday night to swap stories about kings, battles and the last defense keeping those kings alive: a woman who designed Jaime Lannister’s golden hand, an artist raised by swordsmiths, and a museum curator who keeps an armorer on staff.Īt New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Game of Thrones costume designer Michele Clapton, artist Miya Ando and Met curator Pierre Terjanian considered questions like whether the Greyjoys stink of fish oil and what it’s like to fight in 100lb armor, as they treated a small crowd to their thoughts about the arms and armor of history and fiction.

Game of thrones leather armor