#cosplay history

[fabrickind]

Is this enough of a throwback :p

I'm feeling a bit nostalgic because this is the first Fanimecon that I'm missing since I started attending in 2003. Life things are more important, but I figured I'd post a picture from Fanime 20 (!) years ago.

A lot has changed since this 2005 pic, but my love of cosplay hasn't 🧡

Original design catgirl maid by me, 📸 by my mom

[animenostalgia]

The Anime Nostalgia Podcast - ep 144: The Fangirl Diaries with Author Erica Victoria Espejo

Treat yourself or a loved one! TokyoTreat makes the perfect gift for any occasion. Use code "NOSTALGIA" for $5 off your first #TokyoTreat box through my link: https://team.tokyotreat.com/theanimenostalgia

Author Erica Victoria Espejo has not only been an anime fan since the 90s, she's been going to cons & writing about it for over 20 years! And now, she's written a book called The Fangirl Diaries: Finding Community in Anime Fandom of the 90s & 00s, chronicling early anime fandom and cosplay through her lived experience in it while growing up as a queer, femme Asian. Listen in as we discuss daring to share stories of cringey youth, the evolution of fandom, cosplay, and anime conventions, and what it was like to write a book about it all. 

Stream the episode or  [Direct Download] Subscribe on apple podcasts | Spotify

Relevant links:

Buy Erica's book using my affiliate link at Bookshop.org, Amazon, or directly from the publisher!

Check out Erica's website for over 20 years of her anime convention coverage!

Follow Eri on Twitch to watch her "Fansview Friday" streams live, or follow her Youtube account to watch the VODs

Follow Erica's cosplay-focused Instagram and Tiktok

And of course, follow her on Bluesky for updates on her writing and reports!

Bonus: Erica in her custom Baka-Con t-shirt she mentions this episode:

My theme song music was done by Kerobit! You can find more about them on their website!

As always, feel free to leave me your thoughts on this episode or ideas for future episodes here—or email me directly at AnimeNostalgiaPodcast@gmail.com.

Thanks for listening!

[cosplayinamerica]

by Anna-Neko

Before all the endless online, digital everything, before FB and Insta, the “don’t u know how many followers…” & influencers nonsense, there was this man!

Kevin would take your photo, make small-talk & drop encouraging comments and make you feel a star! A former cosplay partner still fondly remembers how he would always know what she was cosplaying as! No matter how obscure! If he didn’t know the cosplay – he would ask about it! The interest always genuine. He seemed to remember everyone from con to con, and in later years when instead of running around he would set up a corner with a backdrop and do photos this way – he would jot down file numbers & email me full-size images after the event if asked.

So just a quick scene setting up. It is very easy to forget, but back then (1999 to maybe 2002~ish) there was waaaaay less conventions. There wasn’t an event happening every weekend, much less multiple events at same time! Digital cameras were not a thing. Well, obviously they existed, but your average otaku heading to an anime con might bring a cheap 35mm disposable camera (or maybe 3, if CVS had a multi-pack sale!).

Kevin’s FansView website was THE cosplay/cons site. He updated multiple times throughout the event, 2 or 3 times each day! There weren’t just photos of “hot people”, he tirelessly took photos of regular attendees, cosplayers of various ages and skill levels, guest & panel highlights…. If you weren’t lucky enough to be at the convention itself, seeing all his photos was the next best thing! In a few years we’d have con report galleries on Cosplay.com, Geocities and LinusLam …. but all these were _after the fact_, not during. Not quite the same, ya know?)

Even my mom knew his website, and during cons I’d call home during the weekend and she would excitedly tell me she was just on Kevin’s site and saw my photo!

Like, seriously…. we’d joke a con wasn’t a con until you either a) saw House of Anime truck in the parking lot, or b) ran into Mr Lillard.

Over the years there’s been all sorts of amazing run-ins with him. He would always make some jokes, and go above and beyond helping a fellow nerd – like the time my brand~new digital camera (in 2000! quite the expense!) suddenly died (6 AA batteries the monster ate) and he kindly tried to help me with both fresh batteries and advice, and when it looked like the camera wasn’t coming back he straight up took out his FILM CAMERA (again, this man was a pro! He always had a backup) and took photos of my cosplay and friends’, and handed me the finished roll

OR that other time my memory card was already full within literally first few hours of the convention (circa 2000, CompactFlash. Gigs? ha! Your PC might have 2 gigs hard drive and be a luxury. Memory cards ran in the Megabites) and this SAINT of a man helped by using HIS LAPTOP to let me clear out the card, email the zip file to myself then and there, and thus have memory space to take another 30~40 photos

or this Other OTHER time we were talking about shitty hotel hallway lights… And asked if he would mind popping with us outside real quick? He took the time to go! Outdoors into the sunshine! On the lawns by the hotel for a good 30 minutes! Thus giving us our first ‘proper’ cosplay photoshoot no less!! (freakin 2001, people!! pro~photoshoots or sheduling time-slots with an online-famous photog was not a thing. Not yet, not for another few years)

He made all us awkward weebs feel welcome from the get~go! Nobody had internet once left the house. No cellphones. Especially not a phone that could double as a hi-res camera. You came to the convention with a cheap disposable film camera, or none at all – hoping your friends brought one. Conventions didn’t have photo suites, no staff photogs… it was not a thing yet.

The other joke used to be “oh you’re at so-and-so con? Did you run into Kevin yet??” or “no no no, don’t change yet! We need to find Kevin!! You must be documented” (and if you had insane luck, you may even see that photo as convention cosplay coverage in an issue of Animerica months later!) For some of us, the only photos of those early costumes only exist because Kevin was there to take it.

#cosplayhistory

[starakex]

I went to an exhibition on costume balls of Canada in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Match made in heaven, obviously, considering the hobbies showcased on this blog. I love costumes! And while I'll probably gush about other elements that are mirrored in today's event-based costume hobbies like Cosplay, Fursuiting, Historical Reenactment, LARPing, and so many I'll forget, something hit me looking at these costumes. A lot of them were dancing the line between being cheaply made (costumes were meant to be worn only a few times, so not made to be durable) and very opulent (costume balls were meant to be events of high society, for what it's worth). But there's something humbling in seeing these century-old costumes, fragile and damaged, and seeing the parallels in the very same costumes we make today.

This is a dress worn by Virginie Faucher at Montréal's Historical Ball of 1898 (Source: Costume Balls: Dressing Up History, 1870–1927). It's very pretty, covered in a lot of embellishments. But you can tell between the original photography of the dress worn at the event and the photo of the dress nowadays that it sustained a lot of damage from aging... but also wear and tear!

While I was looking at it more closely in person, it just hit me. More than a hundred years later, we're worrying about vinyl peeling and cracking, creases from EVA foam pieces bending, hot glue failing and losing parts at the con. I see the missing sequins, the deteriorated metallic threads, and the dirtied hems. Things just stay the same, really, though this dress was kept and preserved despite the damage while hundreds were lost to time, thrown away when the damage was too severe. Maybe we don't need to fear our costumes aging. Dissapointed, maybe, when ketchup lands unceremoniously on your uniform, or a seam pops on your coat, or the fur starts matting on your fursuit. But maybe they're all just the signs of an event well enjoyed. Worth repairing, modifying, and re-wearing, but not to be regretted for moving along with time.

[plurinerd]

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a random tumblr post wrap around to homestuck. (No, I’ve never read it and I’m marginally aware of the history of its fandom)

So a couple days ago, some folks braved my long-dormant social media accounts to make sure I’d seen this tweet:

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

(Oh, and for anyone wondering: yes, I’m over 40 now, and yes, I’m still making costumes. And that armor is still in great shape after 17 years in a hot attic!)  

[batwynn]

I know a lot is going on in the world right now but this kind of loss of art is breaking my heart in two.

The Valentino’s Costume Group in Hollywood has lost everything after the death of their co-founder, the pandemic, strikes, etc. and is now being forced to do a very quick liquidation sale before having to send all of their years of hard work to be turned into rags. (Yes this is a real thing)

These people have crafted thousands of costumes over 20 years to rent to everyone and anyone who needed one. They’re sex worker and queer friendly. They’re also being accused of being “fast fashion” while being one of the few places in this world actively working against fast fashion with their work. They don’t want to have to turn their hard work into rags. It’s the only option for them with the enormous amount of costumes/fabrics they have to remove from the building very quickly.

So, Californians and anyone willing to travel to Hollywood: YOU can save a costume! (or two?) YOU can save someone’s art from being destroyed! YOU can own pieces of Hollywood! YOU can save so much sewing supplies and fabrics!

Where: 5535 CAHUENGA BLVD, N. HOLLYWOOD

Phone: 818-427-5248

Special hours for Influencers: May 20-30th 9:30am-4:30pm MON-SUN

What: Vintage, designer, menswear, historical, specialty, children’s, shoes, jewelry, vintage hats, show packages, racks, fabric, etc!

Important note: Please be kind and patient with the folks managing this sale. There’s maybe 2-3 people working at the most, and they all just suffered the death of someone close to them and the loss of their dream.

Please, please signal boost this. Their hard work should not go to waste and this terrible loss is already hard enough on them.

[actualshonenprotagonist]

Of course Eliot knows how to sew, between his military service, medical skills, and the likelihood that he's slept with a seamstress or two. He can, at minimum, hem a pair of pants and do most types of repairs.

Hardison, though? Sure, word of God is that he makes the disguises that the team uses during cons, which could just mean he's ironing "FBI" transfer letters onto windbreakers.

HOWEVER.

Hardison is a cosplayer in the early 2010s. I did my first con cosplay at AnimeNext in '08. Before 2013 or so, you could not Google a character and find sales listings for a ready-made cosplay. If you wanted to cosplay a character who doesn't wear readily available normal clothes, you had two options: you either found someone who could sew and were very, very nice to them, or you learned how to make stuff yourself. I know several people who taught themselves how to sew by taking apart thriftstore finds for cosplay, and I had a side hustle taking on sewing and patterning commissions.

Hardison could have commissioned his first cosplay, but I think he'd get sucked in. He'd get really excited about computerized sewing machines. He'd get himself a machine that he can hack and reprogram so it's got extra stitches, multiple buttonhole settings, automatic seam guidance, a controlled heat setting that does a fused edge finish on synthetic fabrics. He digitizes his own embroidery patterns.

At some point Eliot asks to borrow a sewing machine because his job is as rough on his clothes as it is on his body, and he nearly has an aneurysm trying to do a basic darning patch on Hardison's beeping whistling computer-monster. A couple days later, a second sewing machine shows up. It's an old one with sturdy metal innards and mechanical dials to set stitch length and width. It has no screen, no control buttons, and only a handful of settings. One of them is a darning stitch.

[cheekios]

Cash App Loan + Interest

If you participate in the poll please reblog and fully interact (♥️ + comment) with my posts.

Goal: $110

CA: $HushEmu

PP: emuslayter@gmail.com

Hey guys it’s cheekios. I have been really struggling lately. Losing my job + only pair of glasses being destroyed I hate to do this. I have no choice to play catch up to stay afloat. This loan will just keep collecting interest. Would really appreciate help with goals this month.

[tyger-land]

ᴇʟᴛᴏɴ ᴊᴏʜɴ Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, California - October 26, 1975 - by Terry O'Neill.

[humanoidhistory]

Halloween Ball at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1949.

[alexisyoko]

I decided to cosplay Grell taking inspiration from a photo of Lili Elbe. Lili Elbe was an artist, as well as the first trans person to get sex change surgeries. She even changed her documents and some still have the audacity to call her a drag queen. Even the identities of real life trans people who already transitioned are debated. The entire "debate" about Grell's gender has nothing to do with Grell. Yes, you heard that correctly. The attitude people have towards a trans character is a reflection of the attitude they have towards real trans people. Some of them are supportive (with or without understanding the issue). Some are neutral. Some are talking even if they didn't do their research (without necessarily having malicious intentions). But there are also people who straight up spread transphobic stereotypes using a fictional character as a premise. This "debate" about Grell's gender has always affected real life trans people...

[shannonpurdyjones]

Spinning in full garb at the Carolina Ren Faire

(If you turn on sound be prepared for the jovial shouts of children and conversations of other faire goers...quiet filming does not exist at ren faires lol)

Took the opportunity to spin in period character while at the ren faire with my partner and kids on Saturday. Got lots of fun questions from other faire goers, many nods of respect from faire staff, and spun about 25-30g of wool. 🥰

Loads of fun, 10/10 would recommend doing period fiber arts as cosplay.

[reds-references]

Have some more Hades x Persephone 💅

[cosplayinamerica]

COSP mailing list

This week I been digging around for information on a cosplay mailing list called COSP. At their heigth there was over 1,000 members with 2001 and 2002 their most busiest years. More than a few cosplayer shave told me about the mailing list. Unfortunately in Dec of 2019, Yahoo took down Yahoo Groups which had ben limping the previous decade.

In this diagram, you can see 1999-2001 had the most traffic. Traffic definite got smaller and some thing cause the drop in members. My guess is Cosplay.com and their message boards but that's my guess. By early 2008, it had drop down close to zero.

I am seeking cosplayers who were active in the 1990s in cosplay/costuming. I'm looking for recollection of the mailing list,how they discover fandom, what were the popular websites at that time, how was the online community and lots more questions. If interested, contact me ejen@cosplayinameriac.com

[so-i-did-this-thing]

Someone just tagged one of my tweedy selfies with "dark academia is problematic" and I'm just dying over here, especially since I associate my look more with riding horses than archiving at the Mütter Museum.

Anyway, "vintage style, not vintage values."

[elliotly]

last Halloween post — Griffin from Babel by R.F. Kuang !