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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…