ABSTRACT
As Albin himself has often commented, this was during the days when the Internet was still in its infancy; and while he
As founder of the world’s largest Star Wars fan costuming club (holding the record in the 2015 Guinness Book of World Records), Albin Johnson none the less remembers his beginnings as just an average Star Wars fan. Having been a casual enthusiast since the first movie hit the big screen in 1977, Johnson recalls that when “the original Star Wars trilogy [returned to the theaters in 1997], the wave of nostalgia I felt for the saga just got me so excited that a buddy of mine and I looked into whether or not there was Stormtrooper armor out there. When we found a set for sale we scooped it up, eager to
Figure 6.1 501st Legion founder Albin Johnson. Photo courtesy of Albin Johnson
Figure 6.2 Photo courtesy of Albin Johnson Figure 6.3 One of Albin’s other Star Wars costuming projects, a costume re-creation of the bounty hunter Boba Fett. “In 2000 I fabricated a Boba Fett costume from scratch, except for the helmet. It was a lot of hard work and fun researching reference photos, building forms for the props, finding common, everyday objects to convert into the props such as the blaster and rocket pack, a lot of sewing to get the cover-alls, gloves, braids, and boots right. I spent a lot of time just tinkering in my garage, constructing a bass wood frame for the rocket pack, covering it with aluminum flashing material, and wiring it all up with lights. I used simple objects to build the rockets thrusters and missile. There is a long, recursive process of constructing prototypes, revising them, scrapping them to start over, all as you learn more and more about the target costume and more about what processes work best.” Photo courtesy of Albin Johnson, https://www. albinjohnson.com/
was able to find the basic Stormtrooper armor kit, “I was completely lost when it came time to put [it] together … There were almost no instructions and certainly no community of costumers to lean on. I dedicated my garage work bench to learning how to put costume pieces together, whether from a kit or from found items. I struggled with the sewing, model-building, fabrication, wood-work, metal-work, and electronics to put it all together.”
