Here is the final design of the girdle with hip-plates attached. The background story of Minotaur in the LARP I attend is that they were all former slaves, thus chains, and other slave icons are kept as family heirlooms and pieces incorporated into clothing.

The armor plates are attached to the chains and can be removed by unscrewing a peg from each connector, which makes it easy to remove these once the "armor points" have been lost.