Chairshot Top 5: Wrestlers With the Strangest Ring Gear

From Giant Gonzalez and Max Moon to Goldust, these five wrestlers wore some of the strangest and most unforgettable ring gear ever seen.

Professional wrestling has produced plenty of colorful outfits, but some ring gear went far beyond flashy tights and elaborate robes. From an intergalactic suit that required multiple boxes to transport to perhaps the most inexplicable bodysuit ever worn at WrestleMania, these wrestlers turned getting dressed for work into something unforgettable.

Professional wrestling has never demanded subtlety.

A wrestler has only a few seconds to make an impression when walking through the curtain, and clothing has always been one of the easiest ways to do it. Randy Savage covered himself in color. Ric Flair made robes part of his identity. The Road Warriors looked like they had been dropped into wrestling from some post-apocalyptic battlefield.

None of that necessarily makes the gear strange. Wrestling is supposed to be theatrical, and the best outfits usually tell the audience exactly who someone is before the bell ever rings.

Then there are the wrestlers whose clothing raises completely different questions.

Why is that man wrestling in what appears to be a giant piece of padded livestock? Why does that other guy have fireworks coming out of his wrists? Why did somebody decide that an eight-foot wrestler needed painted muscles over muscles he already possessed?

Those are the outfits being celebrated here.

The ranking considers how bizarre the gear looked, how strongly it became associated with the wrestler and how difficult it would be to explain the outfit to somebody who had never watched professional wrestling before.

These are the Top 5 wrestlers with the strangest ring gear.

5. Mantaur

There have been hundreds of wrestlers who wore masks. Mantaur somehow went in the opposite direction and wore what amounted to an entire animal head.

When Mantaur arrived in WWE in early 1995, the character was built around the Minotaur of Greek mythology. That already placed him firmly within the period when WWE television could feature occupational gimmicks, cartoon characters and creatures that seemed to have wandered in from another genre entirely.

The costume took the idea literally.

Mantaur approached the ring wearing a massive brown headpiece with horns extending from either side. WWE’s own retrospective described it as a stuffed animal head, and that is probably the easiest description available. Once he reached the ring, the head came off and underneath was Mike Halac, a large bearded professional wrestler wearing relatively conventional gear.

That contrast somehow made the outfit even stranger.

The enormous head suggested WWE was about to unleash some mythological beast. Removing it revealed a wrestler who looked considerably more human than the entrance had promised. It was almost as though the company had designed the costume first and then remembered that somebody actually had to wrestle while wearing it.

Mantaur lasted only briefly in WWE, facing names including Razor Ramon and Bam Bam Bigelow before disappearing from the company later in 1995.

His short tenure helped turn the costume into the kind of image that occasionally resurfaces whenever fans discuss the strangest corners of 1990s wrestling. Plenty of questionable gimmicks from the era have been forgotten.

A giant horned head approaching the ring is considerably harder to erase from memory.

4. Bastion Booger

Some wrestling outfits attempt to make their wearer look more athletic.

Bastion Booger’s gear seemed specifically designed to accomplish the opposite.

Mike Shaw had already wrestled under several personas before WWE transformed him into Bastion Booger in 1993. The character was presented as gluttonous, unhygienic and generally unpleasant, which meant the costume needed to communicate all of those characteristics before Booger even did anything.

The solution was one of the most aggressively unflattering singlets ever designed.

Booger wrestled in a silver-gray outfit that appeared almost intentionally undersized, with unusually shaped straps and exposed sections that made the 400-pound wrestler look like he had either assembled the singlet incorrectly or outgrown it several years earlier. WWE itself later described him as the “silver singlet-clad Booger” while ranking him among the grossest wrestlers in company history.

That ugliness was the point.

Most strange wrestling gear becomes strange accidentally. Designers are trying to create something intimidating or futuristic and eventually wander too far from the original idea. Bastion Booger’s outfit actually succeeded at exactly what it was designed to accomplish.

It made him look disgusting.

That makes the gear strangely effective even while remaining nearly impossible to defend aesthetically. The outfit turned Booger’s body into part of the character and ensured that simply seeing him walk toward the ring told the audience almost everything WWE wanted them to know.

He was not supposed to look cool.

He was supposed to look like somebody nobody wanted to stand beside on an elevator.

For that purpose, the singlet might have been one of the most successful terrible outfits wrestling ever created.

3. Goldust

Goldust presents a problem for this ranking because his gear eventually became iconic.

That does not make it any less strange.

When Dustin Rhodes debuted the Goldust character in WWE in 1995, virtually nothing about the presentation resembled the second-generation wrestler fans had previously known. The cowboy imagery disappeared. In its place came gold-and-black face paint, a platinum blond wig, elaborate robes and a tight gold bodysuit unlike anything another prominent male wrestler was wearing at the time. WWE has described the final Goldust look as a gold bodysuit and face paint after several earlier character concepts were considered for Rhodes.

The outfit worked because it was supposed to make people uncomfortable.

Goldust emerged during a period when wrestling presentation was still dominated by fairly obvious visual archetypes. Tough guys generally dressed like tough guys. Monsters looked like monsters. Colorful babyfaces wore colorful tights.

Goldust looked like something the audience had no established category for.

The wig, makeup, bodysuit and theatrical entrance created deliberate ambiguity around the character. Even before Goldust spoke or interacted with an opponent, the presentation told viewers they were supposed to be slightly unsure of what they were watching.

That was particularly effective because Dustin Rhodes was physically imposing enough that the appearance never made him seem harmless. Underneath the gold paint and costume was a 6-foot-6 wrestler capable of working a physical style, which made the entire presentation more unsettling rather than less.

Unlike most wrestlers on this list, Goldust also proved that bizarre gear does not have to become an embarrassment.

The look survived for decades because it became inseparable from the character. Goldust evolved, the face paint changed and the costumes became more sophisticated, but the essential visual idea remained recognizable.

What began as one of WWE’s strangest outfits became one of its most identifiable.

That transformation is exactly why Goldust belongs here.

2. Max Moon

There is colorful wrestling gear.

Then there is an outfit that needs its own luggage system.

Max Moon appeared in WWE during the early 1990s wearing a multicolored futuristic bodysuit accompanied by oversized gauntlets, mechanical-looking accessories and entrance effects that made him resemble an action figure whose entire accessory pack had been attached at once.

The character originated with Konnan, who told WWE that he had been inspired by a Japanese animated robot that fired confetti and flames. A designer in Los Angeles helped construct the outfit, and WWE ultimately invested $13,000 in the costume. Konnan recalled traveling with several large boxes containing the head, arms, legs and chest components.

That alone probably qualifies Max Moon for this ranking.

The full presentation somehow went further.

WWE later remembered Moon as wearing a multicolored bodysuit with gauntlets that fired pyrotechnics and a jet-pack-style entrance device. The company compared his appearance more to a Saturday morning cartoon character than a conventional professional wrestler.

And that description is difficult to improve upon.

The outfit was not merely strange because it was colorful. Plenty of successful wrestlers have worn considerably louder combinations.

Max Moon was strange because the costume appeared to have its own mythology.

Every component seemed designed to prove that this person had supposedly arrived from somewhere other than Earth. Normal boots would not work. Normal wristbands would not work. Even walking to the ring apparently needed technological assistance.

Konnan eventually departed WWE, and Paul Diamond assumed the character and costume. Moon even challenged Shawn Michaels for the Intercontinental Championship on the first episode of Monday Night Raw before the gimmick disappeared.

The character’s short lifespan probably helped preserve its reputation. Wrestling never had enough time to make Max Moon feel normal.

The audience simply saw a man arrive wearing thousands of dollars worth of intergalactic machinery, wrestle a match and eventually disappear back into whatever corner of the universe had produced him.

Honorable Mention: Repo Man

Barry Darsow went from wearing face paint and leather as Smash of Demolition to looking like a burglar who had been designed by somebody explaining burglars from memory.

Repo Man wore dark clothing, a mask around his eyes and an oversized trench coat covered with questionably useful accessories. WWE later described him prowling around arenas and concealing supposedly repossessed property beneath the coat, including Randy Savage’s famous cowboy hat.

The gear earns an honorable mention because it accomplished something wrestling costumes rarely attempt: it turned a profession into supervillain attire.

A real repossession agent presumably does not sneak around parking lots dressed like a raccoon-themed criminal while carrying stolen wrestling merchandise.

Repo Man did.

The outfit was ridiculous, but it was completely committed to the gimmick. There was never any danger of confusing Repo Man with somebody who had simply chosen unusual tights.

He looked exactly like professional wrestling’s idea of a man who repossessed things.

Whatever that means.

1. Giant Gonzalez

There could really only be one choice.

Giant Gonzalez stood around eight feet tall. That fact alone should have eliminated the need for complicated ring gear.

WWE disagreed.

When Jorge Gonzalez arrived in the company in 1993 after previously wrestling in WCW as El Gigante, he was placed in a skin-colored full-body suit decorated with airbrushed muscles and patches of faux hair. WWE’s own retrospective has described the outfit as a jumpsuit featuring fake fur and painted musculature.

Nothing about it has become less strange with time.

The most confusing part is that Gonzalez did not need visual enhancement. His height already made him one of the most physically unusual performers ever presented by a major American wrestling company.

A normal pair of trunks would have made him look enormous.

Instead, someone decided the giant needed additional muscles painted over his body.

The result created one of professional wrestling’s great visual contradictions. Gonzalez was supposed to look frightening, but the suit constantly reminded the audience that they were looking at a costume. The airbrushed anatomy attempted to make him appear less human while somehow drawing additional attention to the fact that somebody had carefully painted a pretend torso onto fabric.

Then there was the hair.

Patches of brown fur appeared around the shoulders, arms and legs, transforming Gonzalez from an extraordinarily tall athlete into something resembling an undiscovered species wrestling had captured and taught to perform a chokeslam.

The outfit became especially famous because Gonzalez was immediately placed opposite The Undertaker, including a match at WrestleMania IX. That meant one of WWE’s most carefully constructed supernatural characters spent part of professional wrestling’s biggest annual event standing across from a giant wearing painted abdominal muscles.

There have been more elaborate wrestling costumes.

There have been uglier wrestling costumes.

There may even have been individual outfits that were technically more ridiculous.

But few pieces of ring gear have ever been so unnecessary, so immediately recognizable and so completely impossible to explain.

Giant Gonzalez was already a spectacle.

The bodysuit turned him into one of wrestling’s strangest spectacles ever.

Professional wrestling has always understood that an outfit can communicate a character faster than a microphone.

The strange part is how often the most memorable gear comes from pushing that philosophy far beyond reason.

Mantaur needed one enormous piece of costume equipment to explain his entire character. Bastion Booger wore an outfit deliberately designed to make him less appealing. Goldust turned unconventional presentation into something genuinely iconic, while Max Moon required enough equipment to make simply traveling with his costume an ordeal.

Then there was Giant Gonzalez.

Wrestling promoters had access to one of the tallest professional wrestlers who had ever lived and apparently looked at him before deciding the presentation still needed something else.

The solution was fake muscles, fake hair and a flesh-colored bodysuit.

More than three decades later, people still remember it.

That might be the strongest argument possible for strange wrestling gear. The outfits that look normal eventually disappear into old photographs and match footage.

The truly bizarre ones become wrestling history.

Research included archival material and historical features from WWE.com.