I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen someone call the Wonder Woman costume “just a swimsuit with stars on it.” It used to bug me more than it probably should have. Then again, they’re not entirely wrong about where it started.
The Original Bustier-and-Tiara Look
Diana debuted in All Star Comics #8 back in October 1941, and the look H.G. Peter drew from William Moulton Marston’s concepts was unmistakably wartime propaganda dressed up as a costume: a red bustier with a gold eagle across the chest, a tiara, red boots, silver bracelets, a golden lasso, and blue bottoms covered in white stars. Most people remember those bottoms as a skirt. They were actually loose culottes, and they only tightened into the briefs everyone associates with the character within her first year in print.
The patriotism wasn’t subtle, and it wasn’t really supposed to be. Like Captain America, Wonder Woman showed up wrapped in the flag right as America was heading into World War II, which made her instantly legible as one of the good guys even before readers knew the first thing about Themyscira or the Amazons. Marston, a psychologist with famously unconventional ideas about gender, reportedly leaned into the patriotic wrapping partly as cover. a way to smuggle in more subversive ideas about strength and submission under the safety of red, white, and blue.
The Mod Era Nobody Agrees On
Skip ahead to 1968, and Wonder Woman #178 kicked off the strangest stretch in her publishing history. Writer Denny O’Neil and artist Mike Sekowsky stripped Diana of her powers, her costume, her lasso, and her Amazon heritage, dropped her into “Man’s World” as a mod boutique owner, and had a blind martial arts mentor named I-Ching teach her to fight without any of it. She traded the star-spangled look for white jumpsuits, leather, and go-go boots for about four years closer to an Emma Peel knockoff than a demigoddess.
The idea was to make her more relatable to the era’s feminist readers. It didn’t land that way. Gloria Steinem herself weighed in through Ms. magazine, arguing the run was actually anti-feminist that taking away Diana’s powers to make her “ordinary” missed the point of what made her worth reading in the first place. DC brought the powers and the classic costume back in the early ’70s, and George Pérez’s 1987 post-Crisis reboot cleaned the whole thing up further: same bones, bigger hair, bracers instead of thin bracelets, and boots that finally lost the spike heels.
The Jim Lee Jacket That Didn’t Last
Nothing tested reader loyalty quite like June 2010. For Wonder Woman #600, DC co-publisher Jim Lee redesigned the costume as part of writer J. Michael Straczynski’s “Odyssey” storyline, which rewrote Diana’s backstory so she grew up on the streets instead of Themyscira. Out went the red bustier and star-spangled briefs; in came a Wonder Woman jacket, black leggings, and gold gauntlets that looked more biker than Amazon. Straczynski told reporters he wanted to answer a question female fans had been asking for years how exactly she was supposed to fight without everything falling out of a costume that hadn’t meaningfully changed since 1941.
The jacket lasted barely a year before DC quietly reversed it heading into the 2011 New 52 relaunch and even that relaunch briefly floated pants for Wonder Woman in early promotional art before an internal “no pants” policy reportedly pushed several DC heroines back into more traditional silhouettes. Whatever you think of the jacket itself, it’s hard to miss the pattern: DC keeps testing how far the character can move from her original 1941 template, and keeps snapping back to it within a year or two.
The Costume Finally Grows Up On Screen
Live action took its time catching up. Lynda Carter’s 1975 version was pure spectacle gold eagle, red boots, a costume built for a spinning transformation sequence more than an actual fight. The version that changed the conversation belonged to Gal Gadot. Costume designer Lindy Hemming, who’d previously dressed the Bond franchise and Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, built on the Greek-and-Roman battle armor that Michael Wilkinson had introduced for Diana’s brief appearance in Batman v Superman, then pushed it further with more red, bronze tones, and leather. She lined the suit in faux fur so Gal Gadot could actually shoot fight scenes in snow and mud, redesigned the over-the-knee boots into a sportier sandal-boot hybrid, and even remade the tiara in a lighter material so Gadot wouldn’t end up with a headache doing her own stunts.
Costume historian Amanda Weaver put it about as directly as anyone has: the Amazons in this version finally look like actual warriors, not models playing dress-up. Interestingly, one classic element survived every round of “make it practical” the heel. Patty Jenkins insisted on keeping Diana’s high wedge, telling Entertainment Weekly she wanted Wonder Woman to look great and fight hard at once, no different from wanting Superman built like a bodybuilder. Practical armor, impractical shoe. Even the most grounded version of this costume still has one foot in fantasy.
Why Any of This Actually Matters
Superhero costumes for women have a long, tired track record of prioritizing “looks good on the cover” over “makes sense in a fight” cutouts in strange places, heels nobody could run in, armor that skips the parts that would actually take a hit. Wonder Woman’s redesigns are unusual because you can watch the argument play out in public across eighty-plus years: patriotic pin-up, depowered spy, armored Amazon, biker jacket, battlefield warrior. Almost every other flagship hero Superman, Batman got locked into one silhouette early and mostly stayed there. Diana’s costume has been a running debate instead, and reading through it is basically reading eight decades of arguments about what strength is supposed to look like on a woman.
I still don’t think she needed head-to-toe armor to be inspiring. Lynda Carter proved otherwise decades before Lindy Hemming ever got involved. But there’s something satisfying about watching the look finally catch up to the character DC always claimed she was.
