I think that’s exactly Wolverine’s role in the team dynamic, which in one of the (many) places the third X-Men film fell down. You try and put him in the “leader” role and it just doesn’t work.

Plus there never seems to be any order in which X-Men are sent to, in most times, life or death situations. “You, you and you. Go check out Magneto’s hideout for clues in his new weapon. You, you and you. Go suppress that homicidal crowd of Anti-Mutant protestors without hurting them. To the Blackbird!”

I wonder if this is another aspect of Wolverines popularity as an X-Men character. By never really being a ‘team player’ and rebelling somewhat in the way Xavier ran things, there was a bit of subliminal admiration for him rebelling against, however justifiable, a bit of a creepy dictatorship.

I suppose it’s only since the Sixties that the comics have shifted the primary importance of costume iconography from what it symbolises to the reader to what it symbolises to the characters within the story.
Superman’s costume is important because it represents his culture/his mother made it for him. It didn’t mean anything in the first appearance, except “the kids will find this cool”. Which isn’t to say its importance within the character’s world never came up before the ’70s, because that was what the whole “I shall become a bat” was about; scaring a subset of characters within the Batman’s world.

I’ve wandered off your point a bit here, but there may be another post in it.

In a similar way, a lot of action was gotten out of the costumes, and this was a big deal! The original X-Men looked creepily alien in their identical uniforms, with the one extreme form a la the Thing in FF (Iceman)…but then upon graduation they were allowed to design their own “individual” costumes. Cyclops is still wearing his, and I always find it funny that it’s pretty much not too different from the original uniforms…our Scott’s a diffident fellow! And then of course you had the All-New All-Different, and they traded on the costumes too — very individualized, so as better to pick out who you were looking at in the big ensemble crowd. A very neat bit of great design that grafts onto older great design…so I’d almost suggest “thematic costuming” as an important part of the way the X-Men are put together — as you say, they have a group identity, and their “individual” costumes ought to help define their position in the group identity. Not that many comics superteams don’t do this already, but few do it to the level of the X-Men (well, once upon a time, anyway): no accident that both Morrison and Whedon paid attention to ‘em. Visual orientation to the group identity, at a guess, is probably only more strongly emphasized in The Metal Men. Hmm, bold claim? Maybe so…