What do you look at when designing a costume?

Usually I start with character concept but sometimes a new power set will spark my imagination. For example the new Beast Mastery set had me reserving a name and designing a costume for a Native American super hero. He's going to be a Medicine Man/Indian Scout for the U.S. Cavalry whose spirit has returned to the modern world.

I look for an alphabetic list of parts under each category.

Silly me...

Usually I have a generalized idea for what I want, but not a specific image to work from. Example: young goth girl, all alternative costumes are just me trying to come up with different versions of the original idea. More or less. And I often try to use newer costume pieces in some way to justify my having bought them.

But sometimes I get inspired to try a specific look, and often it's because I see a cool costume in the game I want to emulate. This weekend I saw a character with a white-armor-against-black look that reminded me of how Star Wars stormtrooper armor looks, and I spent a lot of time trying to come up with a look for my space-themed raygun blaster character that followed that idea. (There are actually only a handful of pieces that work well for this, but I came up with two variations that I liked).

I also teamed with a friend last week who had a costume that included the fire wings and titan weapons fire sword and a fire aura of some sort and it looked VERY cool, and now I want to create some sort of demon or phoenix/fire salamander/whatever character with that look -- but my problem is I don't want to spend more money at this point, and I only have TW on my 2nd account for now but I only have the fire/ice costume stuff unlocked on my main account. :/ Anyway, I played around and haven't really come up with a look that I really liked just yet -- kind of want to do a smooth, all-black or all-metallic type of body that emphasizes the fire aura/wings over the actual costume...