Outfitting is a hobby!
For me, the greater part of enjoying the “endgame” of Lotro has come from outfitting! Outfitting is a very creative, though not officially recognized hobby that you can engage in while wandering Middle Earth. It is absolutely much more fun than fishing! To find, combine and create ever new and surprising outfits for your characters, can be just as satisfying as obtaining a new weapon with better stats.
You can do outfitting at any level, and as often as you like. Thanks to the wardrobe system you can use all your armour on all of your characters.
For those new to outfitting, I have a few tips to share that I hope you find helpful.
Cosmetic Lotro 
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How far can the wardrobe expand? I’ve purchased 90, and the info I found online is clearly outdated since it says you can have only 70 🙂
Edit: as of 2018 you can expand the wardrobe up to 320 slots.
I’ve recently started to explore the cosmetic system since the start of the Summer Festival, but have come away seriously confused by the difference between equipping or not and storing it in the wardrobe or not etc etc. And also how to use the dyes and keep the original. I don’t think that I am doing any of this correctly, and I’m afraid that a lot of the descriptions of these processes, above, still don’t make sense to me. How do you keep both the original and the dyed copies? In the above it seems to say that you keep a copy of the item in the Wardrobe but in other places it says that you keep the original in the Wardrobe. Which is right? I played around a bit with dying an item and then tried to put it in storage to say bag space but it wouldn’t let me put it there since I already had it (in the original color, I guess?) in storage. Also, how do you dye an item in multiple colors and keep them all? Also, if I get the same cosmetic on multiple characters (e.g., the pre-order gear) can I just keep one copy in the wardrobe and ditch the others on all my alts? I’ve learned how to preview, so that was a victory at least 🙂 and I managed to dye one of the summer tunics and am wearing it now, but beyond that I’m still kind of lost. Any further insight is appreciated!
I will probably have to re-write some of the stuff and your questions help clarifying what isn’t clear. So let me try to shed some light here.
First, there is an actual item, a piece of loot or a cosmetic item, let’s say it is a cloak. The cloak is in your bag taking up a slot.
You can drag this cloak into the wardrobe, but the wardrobe takes a photocopy of that cloak and stores it. The actual cloak item remains available in your bag.
You can dye the photocopy in your wardrobe in several colours, but the original cloak remains unchanged in your bag. All your characters can use everything that’s in your wardrobe.
Now suppose one day you get tired of that cloak and no longer want it taking up wardrobe space because you want to exchange different stuff with your characters. If you have kept the original cloak in your bag, you can safely delete the photocopy from your wardrobe, because you still own the original and can one day put it back in if you so wanted.
If the original cloak is unbound, there is no need to keep it in your own bag taking up space, you can just send it to an alt and store it there. If the cloak is bound (because it was a quest reward for example), you cannot send it to an alt of course.
So before dragging an item or cosmetic to your Outfit Panel and make it bound to your character, it is better to put a photocopy in the wardrobe and use from there. That way the original doesn’t need to become bound and can be stored elsewhere. Storage space is valuable, so the more you can store on an alt the better.
I hope that clarifies some of the confusion! Any other questions I’d be more than happy to answer.
Thanks for the reply — it definitely does help, although I can tell that I am going to have to play around with it a bit in-game. I think I didn’t realize that the Wardrobe was actually making a copy. So how do you dye the same item several different colors? Do you drag it from your inventory into the wardrobe multiple times, making multiple copies? If so, do you dye it first in your inventory or after you drag it?
Also I had a question about this:
“To equip an item: drag it into one of your Outfit Panel slots. Before dragging the item, choose its colour through a drop-down menu.”
This makes it sound like you can choose the color of anything that you might want to equip. But wouldn’t you have to dye it first?
By the way, I should have complimented you before on your very nice site. Very inspirational, although it makes my characters look kinda dumpy. 🙂
Hi Dan, I think I will have to make a separate guide on how to use the wardrobe, as all general cosmetics guides are a bit outdated. Anyway…
Once you have copied an item to your wardrobe it will only be available in its default colour. There is a little dropdown box at the bottom of the wardrobe panel that shows the colours alphabetically. If the item isn’t dyed, it will only show the option “default”. Now suppose you want to dye the item red. You buy a jar of red dye from the auction house (or make one with your scholar). Right click the red dye and then left click on the cloak in your wardrobe to add the dye. Check the little dropdown box again, it will now show default and red. Suppose you also want it in black. Go through the same process again with black dye. The dropdown menu will now show “black, default, red” (in that order, because it is alphabetical). If you want to equip the cloak in red, simply choose the option red and drag the cloak to your outfit panel.
The original cloak never changed colour! It is still in your bags in its default state. You have only dyed the copy in the wardrobe.
Okay I’m sorry to bother you again — seriously, if there is a more general resource that you would rather point me to instead of answering all my questions, that’s okay I won’t mind 🙂 I looked in the Lorebook but the information there didn’t really answer much beyond what you have here. I am looking at my Wardrobe and I wanted to try to take something back out in order to try it on and maybe dye it, but it won’t let me simply drag it out either to my inventory or to my shared storage. And when I click “Remove Item” I get this scary message that says that “If you no longer have the item in your inventory, you will not be able to return it to the wardrobe.” So my problem is that most of the stuff I have in there now (random rewards, a couple of things from the winter festival that I never really used) I got rid of because I thought that having it in my Wardrobe meant that I no longer needed to store it elsewhere. So what happens if I remove it now? Will I lose it forever? That would suck.
LOL I still feel like there is something fundamental that I am missing here.
You’re not bothering at all! You are helping me write a better guide, obviously not everything about the outfit system is self explanatory. If you delete something out of your wardrobe that you have not kept the original of, you will of course loose it as it was only a copy and not the actual item. Yes that sucks, as not everyone understood the wardrobe correctly and thought of it as storage space that you can drag items into but also out of. The first is true, the latter is false. That’s why I recommend you always keep the originals stored somewhere.
Thanks again for your replies! I had a big aha! moment when reading your explanation that when you dye an item in the wardrobe, it simply adds that color as an option to the dropdown panel. That explains why it didn’t seem like I was doing anything when I tried dyeing items in the wardrobe — I didn’t know where to look for the change.
I do still have (at least) one big other question, though: How do you drag items out of the wardrobe if you want to wear them?? Because I tried doing this and it wouldn’t let me. The only thing that I can figure, reading between the lines of what you have written (and not having access to the game right now to test it), is that the *only* place that you can drag items out of the wardrobe is to your Outfit panel, because I don’t think I tried that. I know that it wouldn’t let me move them to either my bag or my vault.
And yes, I discovered that I have definitely lost all of those items that are currently in my wardrobe, because I tossed the originals, not understanding this system at all. Very depressing… but at least I’m glad that my ignorance is help you see what is non-obvious lol.
Hi Dan. You guessed it right. The only place to drag your items to from the wardrobe is into the outfit panel. Before dragging it in there, choose one of the available colours you have dyed it in using the drop down menu. The copy in your wardrobe will remain there. You are merely copying it to your outfit. Basically you are wearing a copy of a copy of the original item…
Thanks again. I’m going to go away and play with the system now and try not to screw it up this time. 🙂 Hopefully some day I’ll be able to have some outfit worthy to share!
He he. Just let me know if you managed to work it all out and actually started to enjoy the endless possibilities of the outfitting system! 😀
Wonderful inspiration, thank you! My first character will only be in Rivendell shortly, so I have great things ahead! : > Can I ask you to clarify what the process is to use medium and heavy armor pieces on light-armor wearers? Does it not matter if the pieces are only used on the cosmetic panel?
Hi,
I followed your instruction but it seemed like I couldn’t dye my chest piece in the wardrobe. Unfortunately I already tossed out the original item :(. Or I did it wrong? The piece remains undyed…please help? Thank you very much
Open the wardrobe. Click on the item. Check the little drop-down box at the bottom. If you click on the little drop-down bottom all available colours should open in a little list for you to chose from. The colours are listed alphabetically (black, burgundy, default, navy, violet), so before opening the little drop-down box you would only see the first listed colour (black). Open it up for more colours.
Hope that helps?
hi there..I just did and in the dropdown the color is “unique”
Ah that explains it. You cannot dye an item that has the colour “unique”.
You can always check if you can or cannot dye an item by using the preview panel (ctrl+leftclick`) and then checking if you can use the colour options or not. If the dropdown colour options in the preview panel don’t work, then your item cannot be dyed.
awe no wonder..tyvm..and btw I love your blog..great job:)
You’re welcome, and thank you 🙂
Very inspirational designs 🙂 But I needed the whole wardrobe dye information. I have been confused about the details. Your explainations have cleared up my misconceptions.
How can we submit an outfit? I ask as I have a really nice Spartan looking suit I want to submit
This blog is not intended for outfit submissions. There is a long standing thread on the Cosmetics Forum where you can post your screenshots.
https://www.lotro.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?701-Cosmetics-and-Appearances
Pretty! This has been a really wonderful post. Many thanks for supplying this information.
Please reactivate this blog, it’s awesome ❤
So I don’t understand — brand new — is not the cosmetic armor supposed to only be an appearance over the actual armor you have on. I bought one and dyed it and I can only switch it with the actual armor i earned in the game. The actual armor adds protection but this gets replaced by the cosmetic which has none. Is this working as intended?
Hello Xeang, welcome to Lotro. The cosmetic system works with a separate panel where you can equip your cosmetic items. In fact there are 8 panels that you can open up. There is a tab named “equipment”, where you see your character and equip your armour. Next to this tab there is one called “cosmetic outfits”. This is the one where you put your cosmetics. You can also access it by pressing the C-key. Hope this helps.
Thank you it makes sense now; but like the prior person I double clicked and it went into equipment first and dyed it there unfortunately. On the plus side I’ve got it only in the cosmetic portion and am getting AC now. The devs should make this a little more user friendly to avoid such drama. Thanks again.
Hello, do you have advise for “norse” inspired clothing ? Like Rohan and viking-ish parts of outfits. I was off the game for a loooong time, what I have is a lot of mithril coins and no clues about the rewards that can be used as cosmetic in this theme…Anyway, thanls for your blog 🙂 Very inspiring.
Hello Melandrhild, I’m not exactly sure what you are looking for. Tolkien inspired his dwarven culture on a lot of Norse mythology, perhaps you will find something with the dwarves in Skarhald?
hello is there a way to equip something that isnt your class but as a cosmetic?