Superhero costumes go through a lot of design changes before the final version is found, though often, the screen ready costume is only a slight variation on whatever the original idea is. However, when it came to creating Hawkeye's look in the original Avengers movie, it seems that some concept artists tried some unique ideas. Artist Charlie Wen recently dropped this look that showed a version of Hawkeye that put him in less of a uniform and more of a patchwork of items that he found around the house. Check it out below.
Charlie Wen calls the outfit Urban Hawkeye, and it's a name that certainly fits. It's a lot of grey and simple gloves and pants that don't look like they were custom made for him by whoever handles the wardrobe at S.H.I.E.L.D. It looks exactly as described, the sort of thing somebody might put together to make a costume out of things they had on hand. It feels like the all-black that Daredevil wears in the first season of the Netflix series or like Peter Parker's first Spider-Man costume.
The thing that makes this costume the most interesting is what it would have said about the character of Hawkeye that could have been potentially different than the version we got in the Avengers. While it's never specifically stated where Hawkeye's costume comes from one just sort of assumes it was S.H.I.E.L.D. issued. He's a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent when we first meet him in Thor and whether they provide the uniform or he has it made, the formalness of it shows his connection to the organization. If S.H.I.E.L.D. is just cool with Hawkeye pulling whatever out of his closet, it potentially means the man and the organization could have had a somewhat different relationship.
Charlie Wen says in one of the comments on his Instagram post that this sort of designing is done before the story or script is completed, meaning that a wide variety of concepts can get covered to serve as points of conversation. Ultimately, Wen had no idea what would be happening with Hawkeye in the movie. If Clint Barton had found himself working more on his own this outfit could have worked nicely.
Of course, working on his own is exactly how we might find Hawkeye the next time we see him. Hawkeye was MIA from Avengers: Infinity War but we have every reason to believe that he'll be back in Avengers 4. He's no longer part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and half the world has blinked out of existence. While leaked set photos have indicated that Hawkeye's new duds probably didn't just come out of his closet, we are likely to see a very different sort of character when the new film hits next year.
