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Breaking All The Rules: Cosplay and the Art of Self Expression (website, 2013)
By Ger Tysk Breaking All The Rules: Cosplay and the Art of Self-Expression is a photobook project documenting the culture of fan costuming, known in most circles as “cosplay,” across the United States. Cosplayers take their favorite characters from media such as TV shows, cartoons, movies, and video games and recreate the outfits in order to become a “live” version of the character. Although the term “cosplay” was first coined in Japan from the words “costume” and “play”, fan costuming has been a part of pop culture since the boom of science-fiction conventions in the mid-20th century. Recently, however, cosplay has…
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Cosplay in the United States (1995)
Fashion and style, glamour, glitz aand Gamilons? Obviously these are not the runways of Paris, the pageant that we’re describing is the fantastic world of COSPLAY. Cosplay is an abbreviation of the words costume and play and implies more than just standing on stage and allowing the audience to gawk at your wardrobe. Cosplayers perform skits, sing songs (or at least lip-synch) and attempt for one shining moment to make the audience believe that their favorite celluloid or manga heroes have come to life. While the cosplay scene is close to twenty years old in Japan in the U.S. it’s just beginning. It is estimated that there are about one hundred dedicated cosplayers currently in the U.S. While the tradition of…
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The Whole Costumer’s Catalogue : A Review
By Alessandra Listen up, children. Once upon a time there was no such thing as the Internet. In those dark days we had to scrape and scrounge what information we could find wherever we could find it: public libraries, phone books, bulletin boards, the backs of obscure magazines. There was no easy way to locate materials, instruction, or supplies. If we needed to research something out of the ordinary, first we had to figure out where and how we could even find the information before we could learn it. In those dark days, clothing and costume design was not the…
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To Be Others is to be more like ourselves
By Andrea Letamendi. Why might a person want to become someone else? What would compel them to put on a costume and assume a different identity? We might ask what flaws or deficits they are trying to conceal. What history, what personality, what kind of life are they trying to escape? What are they hiding behind the mask? Perhaps we’re coming from the wrong angle with those questions. That is, what if I told you that persons who cosplay actually feel more like themselves when they are in costume? What if looking like someone else makes them feel like who…
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How Cosplay Can Change Lives
By: Liz Ohanesian Ginger Burton remembers the first anime convention she attended. It was Anime Expo back in 2007. While Burton knew about anime, she was unfamiliar with cosplay. Cosplay is when people dress up in costumes, frequently based on pop culture characters, for fan events. Halloween costumes aren’t cosplay, although someone might bust out their Wonder Woman outfit from San Diego Comic-Con for October 31. The history of cosplay goes back decades and is tied to conventions catering to fans of science fiction, fantasy, comic books, etc. As conventions have become more frequent, and more popular, cosplay has blossomed…
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Some Thoughts on Costuming
by Carol Resnick I don’t know why other people go into costuming, but to me it is the thrill of visualizing a costume (or a presentation, as in 1979) and then making that visualization a reality. In truth, by the night of the competition, it’s all rather anti-climactic; I know long before then whether or not I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. Which isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the cheers of the crowd; of course I do-and as Sandra Miesel says elsewhere, the biggest thrill and most sought-after accolades are those that come from my fellow…
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Anime in America : A Personal Account
By vfxart Let me go back to 1975 or so, yeah my fandom started then. I was early school-age, but grabbed easily. 😉 But first, and this may be important, I will talk mostly about the mid-80s through mid-90s, having been one of the crew/supporters of AnimeCon ’91, and some related fun. In the mid ’70s I was still in my home state of Massachusetts, where afternoons, like a lot of the country, meant watching what we knew then as Speed Racer. It was different, somewhat clunky, but appealing to a ~6 yo boy. I’m 51 now. Jump ahead a…
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30th Anniversary of Cosplay
By Takahashi Nobuyuki The word “Cosplay” spread from a magazine called “My Anime.” During the 1970’s manga clubs and movie clubs were very popular among college students. During the early 70’s there was a strike done by students about policy and rules. College manga clubs were formed around this time the act of protesting against them as non-policy rules. Combined with the mini comic magazine boom during the time, on the model of literary Doujinshi, Manga Review and Doujinshi such as “Manpa”, “Dax” and “Wasedaman” were also became popular. Manga Doujinshi which helped make the comic market become larger first…
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There is nothing ordinary about cosplay
By Greyrondo There is nothing ordinary about cosplay. Whether it’s the character’s personality or the costume, the end result is always larger than life—not that cosplayers would ever have it any other way. But both the inspiring art and the craft behind cosplay are neither solely historical costuming nor modern fashion: cosplay is the fusion of tradition and innovation. In this same way, creating the costumes is a combination of learning from the past and inventing the present. From a beginning cosplayer’s perspective, the skills needed to create a costume seem endless. The average costume will have most of the…
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A brief history of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization, America’s first anime fan club
By Sy Sable On 4/4/2020, Sy Sable (Mark Merlino) sent this brief history of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization, founded in 1977. His story comes from recent message trading with someone interested in the C/FO and those involved. He couldn’t connect her to people out of contact for over 20 years, but he could tell how the club started. Today, there’s a worldwide network we could call capital-F Furry fandom, but some key founders were “proto-furries” who met at the C/FO. The club introduced new and unusual imported Japanese anime that was starting to reach America through rare home video tech. Club…