When The Mandalorian was first announced as a new show for Disney+, Star Wars fans immediately began to wonder if the first and most famous Mandalorian in Star Wars, Boba Fett, would end up part of the story. While we were initially told that would not be the case, it would seem that you cannot keep a good bounty hunter down, and Boba Fett became a big part of the show's second season. It was great to see Boba back in his Mandalorian armor, but fans that know him well likely realized that he wasn't quite back to all his former glory, as there were a couple elements of the original costume that are missing now.
Originally brought up by CBR, a look at the original Boba Fett costume seen in both Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi reminds us all that Fett had a cape back then, which he doesn't wear at all in The Mandalorian. The cape certainly isn't in the possession of Cobb Vanth when we first meet him at the beginning of Season 2, so what happened to it?
It's perhaps, not that surprising that the cape hasn't survived. Mandalorian armor is capable of standing up to lightsabers, and so the armor itself is going to withstand whatever gets thrown at it, but the cape itself was likely just a piece of regular fabric. Thus, it's certainly possible, even likely, that the cape was destroyed by the digestive tract of the sarlacc. That thing probably has some pretty mean stomach acids.
At the same time, the fact is that we don't actually know how Boba Fett lost his armor to begin with. One assumes he was still wearing it when he survived his sarlacc ordeal, so what happened that resulted in him losing it afterward? He almost certainly didn't give it up voluntarily. Perhaps the cape was taken by whoever took the armor, but that person just wasn't a fan of capes, and so it was discarded at some point.
The same could be true of the other piece of Boba Fett's original outfit that is missing in The Mandalorian. Fett had a braid of some material that wrapped around the right shoulder of his armor which is no longer there. Like the cape, the braid likely simply didn't survive the wear and tear of the years the way the armor would. Although that would likely depend on what the braid was made of. At one point in Star Wars history, it was suggested the braid was made of Wookie scalps that Fett had collected from victims, but that description predated even the prequel trilogy, so it's possible the "canon" source is something else entirely.
These could just be minor details that The Mandalorian team simply took an opportunity to remove for simplicity's sake. But who knows? Maybe we'll get some more specific answers to where these things went when we finally see The Book of Boba Fett when it debuts on Disney+ in 12 months time.
