Meriadoc "Merry" Brandybuck costume from The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring

"Merry wears a really nice green felt jacket that is kind of dressy.  I think out of all the Hobbits, Merry is probably the most vain.  He actually cares about his clothes.  He's probably the guy who would be the most ****-ed if he fell down and got his jacket dirty or got a hole in his trousers.  So when I was doing the wardrobe fittings with Ngila [Dickson, the costume designer], the thing that we responded to well together was the fact that he's a smart, kind of snappy dresser." -Dominic Monaghan (Merry), from an interview in the Lord of the Rings Fan Club Official Movie Magazine, issue no. 9.

When I started off trying to make a muslin mock-up for the Merry Brandybuck frock coat, I knew I had a big challenge ahead of me.  It was no problem adapting a historical frock coat pattern for the body of the coat.  But even after scouring through all of our patterns, and looking through the pattern books at my local fabric store, I couldn't find anything that I could adapt to make the distinctive vented tails and gathered sleeves.  With her characteristic infinite patience, my friend Judy showed me that drafting my own pattern for the tails and sleeves was within my abilities! There are very few scenes in Fellowship of the Ring in which Merry does not wear a cloak.  In fact, there is only one scene: "Get off the road!" -- the Hobbits hiding from the Ringwraith underneath a tree stump.  I had to look to other sources for visual references on the coat.  Luckily, my brilliantly thoughtful parents presented me with the Sideshow/WETA statue of Merry Brandybuck for my birthday in March.  The statue turned out to be a fantastic reference for the coat, especially for the tails! With Judy's help, I experimented and changed my muslin mock-up until the tails were the right fullness and shape. For the unique gathered sleeves, I drafted a low-cap, fitted sleeve with added fullness through the sleeve.  For the gathering at the wrist, Judy suggested using cartridge-pleating tape, replacing the cord with elastic to accomodate greater ease of movement. For the rounded lapels and collar of the coat, I started off with the collar from a commercial pattern, and adapted it to suit my needs. Once I worked out all the kinks in my muslin (ah, how easy it is to sum up weeks of hair-pulling and frustrating work in a single sentence!), I constructed my coat.  The fabric I used is a beautiful hunter-green wool.  Due to a rather happy accident on Judy's part, she felted my wool to its current color and texture.  I'm very pleased with the finished fabric...it more closely resembles the fabric used in the movie than it did before the felting accident!  :-) The coat is lined in standard poly lining fabric.  Not accurately Hobbity fabric, I know, but a heck of a lot lighter and cooler than anything else! I could not find brass buttons in the appropriate shape and size, so I painted wooden buttons, and used fine-grade sandpaper to give them a slightly tarnished look. The finishing touch is the straight-stitching detail along the collar, lapels, down the front of the coat, and around the sleeves.  I stitched this by hand, with heavy upholstery thread so it would show.

Please feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions concerning this or any of my other costume projects! Click here to return to the Merry Brandybuck The Fellowship of the Ring costume index.