Morphing Outfit

Cassie in her leotard.

"We need to coordinate these morphing outfits. I mean, Cassie's wearing green patterned leggings and a purple stretch top, and Jake's got on those awful bike shorts, and Rachel is stylish, as always, in her black tights. Put it all together and we look pretty scruffy."

―Marco

A morphing outfit (also called a morphing suit) is a skintight outfit that the Animorphs incorporated into the morphing process to avoid nudity when they demorphed. It was also incorporated by Ax and Tobias into their human morphs respectively to prevent them from being nude. The morphing outfit consisted of a leotard or tight tops with leggings or tights for the girls, and bike shorts and tight shirts for the boys,

History

"As my skin began to appear, so did my morphing outfit. Fortunately, after a few tries, we had all learned to morph some very minimal clothing. Usually nothing more than skintight workout clothes or leotards. Not enough to go walking around in, but enough to keep us all from dying of embarrassment when we morphed in front of each other."

―Rachel

Upon acquiring the power to morph, the Animorphs discovered that they were morphing out of their clothes and thus were nude when they demorphed. Because the morphs were based on a creature's DNA, physical items like regular clothing weren't included in the morph. Cassie was the first one to figure out how to incorporate clothing into the morphing process, although she realized that the clothing could only be skintight. The morphing process treated the skintight fabric as being part of the skin, and thus it would go to Z-space along with the morpher's mass and then would return over the skin when they demorphed. Within a week, Cassie taught Jake, Rachel and Marco how to incorporate a morphing outfit into their morphs, with Jake and Marco using bike shorts with tight shirts while Cassie and Rachel wore stretch tops with leggings or tights as well as leotards. Ax was later taught to incorporate a tight shirt and bike shorts into his unique human morph as well.

Such outfits generally weren't considered acceptable for outerwear and were meant more for modesty when morphing around each other. However, they were thin enough to wear under other clothing.

Trivia

• Jake, Rachel and Marco had not yet learned how to morph clothing by the time they first attacked the Yeerk pool, which was on the same day Rachel and Marco acquired their first morphs, and thus would've been nude when they demorphed. The graphic novel rectifies this by giving the Animorphs a day between acquiring their morphs and attacking the pool as well as adding a new scene where Rachel, Jake and Marco are confirmed to have learned how to morph clothing in the interim.
• Ironically, most of the book covers depict the characters wearing regular street clothing, which would not be included in the morphs.