Cosplay

 

[About 2½ weeks ago, my friend Kirk e-mailed me that he’d gone to see a middle school show (no, he didn’t say what made him do that), and he commented that one eighth-grade actress impressed him.  He reported that her program bio said she does cosplay.  Kirk added, “If you don't know what that is, look it up.  I had to.”  (We’re both a couple of old codgers—though I don’t know that Kirk would appreciate my including him in that remark.)

[“I do know what cosplay is,” I huffed a little in response, “generally speaking.”  As a second thought, I added, “It occurs to me that it’s a suitable subject for a blog post . . . .  I’ll have to look into this.”

[Kirk went on to say that his son and daughter-in-law knew about cosplay—but they’re a couple of Millennials.  “If you do a blog piece on it,” my friend concluded, “I'll learn too!”

[So I did . . . and here it is!]

So, for those who don’t already know, what is cosplay?  One waggish website described it this way:

Think Halloween costume but all year-round and then dial it up to 11—that sort of comes close to what cosplay is.  

Not a bad description, especially if you’ve ever seen New York City’s Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.  The Coney Island Mermaid Parade, held annually in June (the 40th parade was held on 18 June 2022) comes in a close second—or maybe it’s a tie. 

Cosplay is a performance art in which the participants dress in costumes and make-up—many quite elaborate and, I believe, mostly homemade (or, at least, assembled by the wearer)—representing characters or concepts from Japanese anime and manga, Western comic books, graphic novels, video games, television shows, and films, in venues apart from the stage. 

Some cosplay enthusiasts spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on custom-made outfits for events, many more invest time and creativity, using cheap materials and household items to transform themselves into characters of heroic, superhuman, or mythical proportions.

In addition to creating authentic costumes, the participants also act in character, or ‘role-play,’ copying their mannerisms and gestures and are usually subject matter experts on the characters they are personating. 

Cosplay embraces a wide diversity of character sources, many representing American comic book, movie, and video game characters.  Popular sources include Disney, Marvel, and D.C. comics; Lucas Films spin-off books and comics; Blizzard Games, and Bethesda Games.

Though originating in Japan, cosplay participants in the United States (and elsewhere, including Japan) use sources other than anime and manga for their character choices.  At conventions, you’re likely to see Sailor Moon, Batman, Cloud, Luke Skywalker, and Thor attending the same panel discussions. 

The age range for cosplay encompasses young children, preteens and teens, young adults, and older grown-ups.  Convention attendees sometimes include whole families.  Characters range across all ages, genders, races, and sectors of the galaxy and universe.

There’s also considerable cross-racial and -gender costuming (the latter is known as ‘crossplay’), which can cause some tension, though seldom is it meant to be demeaning or insulting.  Participants just dress up as the characters they admire, irrespective of race or gender.  Occasionally, that exercises someone else taking part in the event.

The point of cosplay is to portray a character.  A cosplayer can do this ‘accurately’ by copying a character’s exact look, down to the details, and mimicking his behavior and demeanor.  She or he can also put her or his own individual spin on the character.  Some cosplayers even invent their own characters, rather than draw on one from fiction.

Let’s do a little lexicography.

First, the word ‘cosplay’ is a portmanteau word, a blend of words in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word, from ‘costume’ + ‘play.’  Oddly, it came to English from the Japanese word kosupure, short for kosuchumupure, which in turn was borrowed from the English words ‘costume’ and ‘(role) play,’ reportedly introduced in print in 1984 (some sources say 1983) in an issue of the magazine Mai Anime/My Anime.

Second, the word in English can be used as a noun, an attributive noun (a noun used like an adjective), an intransitive verb (i.e., without an object), or a transitive verb (with an object):

‣  noun: In cosplay, a good costume is as much about creativity as it is about the outcome.

‣   attributive noun: My nephew is a big cosplay fan.

‣   intransitive verb: They cosplayed for hours at a time.

‣   transitive verb: She said she has cosplayed other women in science fiction or fantasy.

Someone who engages in cosplay is a ‘cosplayer.’

Who, a celebrity news and entertainment weekly magazine published in Australia, included in one of its articles I read a little primer it called “How To Do Cosplay”; I think I’ll insert it here:

1.  Pick a character or concept you want to dress up as.  Consider your favourite comics, TV shows, and movies.  You can even dress up as a meme!

2.  Choose the ‘style’ you want to do your costume in.  Are you going to copy the character/concept as accurately as possible?  Or do you want to do a special ‘version’ of it, like a steampunk version, sexy version, gender-swapped version, etc.?

3.  Shop for your costume pieces.  You can check out sites like Ezcosplay for cosplay-specific items, or you can go to your nearest mall/clothing store to build it from scratch.  If you have money to spare, you can pay a cosplayer or costume-maker to make the outfit and props for you.

4.  OPTIONAL: If you want to take your cosplay to the next level, practice ‘acting’ as the character.  It doesn’t need to be perfect, but at least try to get their moves or poses down for the photos.

Now, let’s have a brief look at the history of cosplay.  (This survey is largely based on a chronology on the website for Who, the Aussie entertainment magazine.  It was posted in 2014, so it only goes up to 2013.)

Though most histories of cosplay start in the second third of the 20th century, when it was called, simply, “costuming” or “fan costuming.”  Who, in a separate post from the timeline I mentioned, links the practice to roots in early 15th-century carnivals where people dressed up as objects, concepts, famous historical figures, or popular characters from fiction or stage plays.  (Wikipedia also starts here.)

I’m skeptical of this connection as a substantive forebear of today’s cosplay, since humans have been dressing up for any number of purposes since they first crawled out of the sea.  The drive to dress up is surely as old as human society itself.  The first costumed performance must have occurred the first time a Neanderthal hunting party put on animal skins and danced around the campfire to replay the day’s success.

Later, the animals and hunters in the dances were supplemented with gods and spirits, heroes and adversaries, all appropriately garbed and masked, and the stories became plots or scenarios, and plays were invented.  Along the way, one can certainly imagine that other costumed performances, or performative events, were conceived like pageants and, yes, the precursors of cosplay.

As I said, Wikipedia also invokes the 15th-century European carnivals as the initiation of cosplay.  The online encyclopedia then moves the off-stage costuming impulse—working in the theater, despite the dressing-up, isn’t cosplay, though it might be hard to verbalize the distinction—to the late 19th century with the costume party and the fancy-dress party.

I don’t think the costume party is as popular today as it was a couple of generations ago.  It did continue well into the 20th century; I remember my parents attending several when I was little—there are even photos I still have of a few of the occasions when they left the house dressed as someone or other.

Then Wikipedia conjured up an event of which I’d never even heard, but which sounds like a Victorian-era precursor of the science fiction conventions I’ll be writing about shortly.  In 1891, a man named Herbert Tibbits conceived of what would today be described as a “cosplay” event held from 5-10 March in London.  It was called the Vril-Ya Bazaar and Fete, based on an 1871 science fiction novel, The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-73), and its characters.

Tibbets organized the fete to raise money for a London hospital of which he was the founder.  It had all the earmarks, however, of the first sci-fi convention, and serves very nicely as the antecedent of the conventions of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The documented history of cosplay, according to Who magazine, starts with 1939, when Forrest J. Ackerman (1916-2008), whom the magazine dubbed “perhaps the greatest fan of science fiction who ever lived.”  He went to the first World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon (2-4 July 1939 in New York City), dressed in “futuristicostume” and “strode the streets looking like a proto-superhero” speaking Esperanto with the designer of his costume, Myrtle Douglas.  He’s believed to be the first sci-fi fan to attend a conference in costume.

A year later in Chicago (1-2 September 1940), the first Worldcon masquerade took place.  According to Mike Resnick (1942-2020), sci-fi writer, in his book . . . Always a Fan (‎Wildside Press, 2009), “for the first couple of decades it was actually a masquerade ball.” There was a band, drinks, and dancing, with prizes handed out at the end of the night.

17 years after he cosplayed at the first Worldcon, Ackerman returned to the convention to report for Fantastic Universe, a science fiction magazine.  By 1956, wearing costumes was so well established that, Ackerman wrote: “Monsters, mutants, scientists, spacemen, aliens, and assorted ‘Things’ thronged the ballroom floor . . . .”  

By the early ’60s, Resnick wrote, “a number of fans spent considerable time—weeks, sometimes months—preparing their costumes.”  In 1963, Bruce Pelz (1936-2002), a sci-fi fan described by Resnick as “the most creative” costumer, attended Worldcon (31 August-2 September in Washington, D.C.) as Fafhrd from the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories (1958-88), about an unlikely pair of heroes found in and around a city on an alien world, written by fantasy legend Fritz Leiber (1910-92).

The first Comic-Con was held at the U. S. Grant Hotel in San Diego (a one-day event called San Diego’s Golden State Comic-Con on 21 March 1970).  Three hundred people attended, but costuming didn’t play a prominent role at the event.

In 1971, someone showed up at Worldcon in a nude costume for the first time in over two decades.  Resnick wrote that after that, “throughout the 1970s and 1980s there were half a dozen or so nude costumes every year.”  (A “nude costume” is what you probably imagine: not actual nudity, but a costume—perhaps a skin-colored body-stocking or appropriately decorated bits of clothing that give the impression of nakedness.)

Resnick reported in 1974 that Worldcon (29 August-2 September in Washington) masquerades had grown to more than 100 participants each year.  In its fourth year, San Diego Comic-Con (31 July-5 August 1974), as it was then known, began staging its own masquerade.  

A report in 1975 in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described sci-fi conventions as “largely devoted to costume dances, parties, and mutual flattery.”

In 1980, the manga series Urusei Yatsura was released in Japan and along with the 1979 TV series Mobile Suit Gundam, helps popularize cosplay in Japan—though the word hadn’t been coined yet.

By 1982, the Worldcon (2-6 September in Chicago) masquerades were so popular, Resnick wrote, that organizers separated the competition into three categories: novice, journeyman, and master.

The inaugural Costume-Con was held in San Diego on 14-16 January 1983.  The new convention, which invited costumes depicting “anime, comics, video games, fantasy, sci-fi, theatrical/film/TV costumes, millinery, fursuits, and more,” took costuming from the sidelines and made it the main attraction.  (Fursuits, for the uninitiated, are custom-made animal costumes worn—and often designed—by cosplayers and members of the “furry fandom,” commonly known as “furries.”)

A Japanese reporter and manga publisher was the first to use the term ‘cosplay’ in print in 1984 after attending Worldcon, also known as L.A.con II (30 August-3 September) in Anaheim, California.  Captain Tsubasa, a manga about a soccer team was published the same year and increased cosplay’s popularity in Japan because it’s easy to dress up like a soccer player.

With the term “cosplay” yet to infiltrate the US, the Los Angeles Times described the Worldcon (28 August-1 September 1986 in Atlanta) masquerade as “much like a fashion show,” which “brought out master craftsmen who had spent hundreds of hours producing costumes that could grace a film with a $38-million budget, and novice consumers who use a minimum of materials.”

On NBC’s hit comedy Friends in 1996, Ross admitted to a fantasy likely shared by most straight men his age: Return of the Jedi era Princess Leia in a gold bikini (“The One with the Princess Leia Fantasy”; Season 3, Episode 1; 19 September).  Rachel complied with the request and even threw in some side hair buns for good measure.

The wildly popular anime Sailor Moon aired for the last time on TV Asahi in Japan in 1997.  According to the Japan Times, it “inspired a gazillion cosplayers to don Japanese schoolgirl miniskirts, prudence be damned.”

The first cosplay cafe opened in Akihabara, Tokyo, in 1999.  Many more followed throughout Toyo and Osaka.

Dengeki Layers, a magazine targeting the Japanese cosplay community launched in 2003.

The first World Cosplay Summit was held in Nagoya, Japan, on 12 October 2003.  Cosplayers from four countries, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, participated in the festivities.

Jessica Nigri (b. 1989), an American-New Zealand cosplayer, promotional and glamour model, YouTuber, voice actress, and fan convention interview correspondent, was photographed at San Diego Comic-Con (23-26 July 2009) in a sexy Pikachu costume.  The photo went viral as she began her ascension as one of the biggest cosplay celebrities in the world.

The reality competition Heroes of Cosplay premièred on Syfy on 13 August 2013.  Despite heavy criticism from the cosplay community, the series was a modest ratings success, with its première drawing three-quarters of a million viewers.  No further contests were scheduled to be aired in the ensuing years, however.

This history of cosplay focused on various conventions and related events.  Who magazine, though, considers other activities, of most of which we’ve all heard for years, they include under the rubric of cosplay: live action-role playing events, historical reenactments, Renaissance fairs, game enactments like Dungeons & Dragons, and so on.

Back in cosplay’s early days, even up to the early 2000s, anything that smacked of geekiness or nerdiness like comics and cosplaying was considered uncool.  Non-cosplayers didn’t see the appeal and teased and bullied cosplayers—and not just kids.   

Today, however, the cosplay community is bigger than it ever has been.  Not only are more people getting into cosplay, but cosplay itself is becoming more and more lucrative.  Top-level cosplayers like Jessica Nigri, whom I mentioned earlier, and others such as Enji Night (b. 1991) and Hana Bunny (b. 1990) get paid (quite a bit, I gather) to dress up, appear at cons, and even promote products.

One thing, a (usually) costumed performance, that’s not cosplay, is—as I said earlier—theater.  Since this post started because a young actor declared that she also did cosplay, maybe I should try to distinguish between the two performative endeavors.  Let’s see if I can articulate the distinction.

As we’ve seen, the main aim of cosplaying is to create a character.  That’s the point of the whole effort.

You’d think (if you didn’t know better) that that’s also what an actor does.  Well, yes, he or she does create a character.  But that’s not the whole point of his or her job.  It’s just a means to a larger end.

As an actor in a play—and for the purposes of this examination, I’m assuming a traditional play, with a script—I have to create a character in order to bring the play to life, to tell the playwright’s story, make her or his point.  My character isn’t an independent entity, he lives through and for the world of the play—and the other characters. 

When a cosplayer interacts with another costumed character, they respond to one another according to each character’s persona—as the cosplayer has seen it.  But that’s really all—the cosplayers will try to behave in line with the way they believe their characters will react if they were real, but there’s no deeper context.

As an actor, I have to have understood my character’s purpose within the world of the play, my ‘role’ in that world.  I’m trying to accomplish something with respect to the play and the other characters—I don’t get to do whatever I feel like.  Cosplayers can: they are free to do what they feel like, including walk away.

I’m bound to a score, much like a musician is.  In the case of the actor, I’ve developed my own score, with the help of the playwright and the director (who don’t exist in cosplay).  In essence, with those other artists, I invent my character—even if it’s Hamlet or Oedipus, who’ve been around for hundreds of years.  My Hamlet or my Oedipus is not the same as all the others; I’m not trying to replicate a figure from another medium.  I invented my character; I’m not trying to be true to a template.

All this makes a costumed actor in a play different from a costumed cosplayer at a convention.  To further distinguish what I do from what they do, that costume I wear isn’t of my own devising, or my choice.  I have to make it mine, but after others have decided what it’ll look like. 

Of course, the words I say on stage aren’t mine—though I have to make them mine.  The movements I make aren’t mine either—but I have to make them mine, too.

And, on top of all that, I have to do and say the same things tomorrow night that I did and said tonight.  I’ve been doing and saying the same things for weeks—even though I have to make then seem like I’d never done or said them before.  The cosplayer doesn’t have that burden, either.

So, that, I think, is why acting in a play is not cosplay, even though actors and cosplayers both wear costumes and play characters.  Besides, the cosplayer tends to stick with the same character, if not forever, then for a long time.  The stage actor “in his time plays many parts,” as Shakespeare told us. 

(There’s a 1982 teleplay, based on a Kurt Vonnegut story, called Who Am I This Time? that takes off from the phenomenon of actors changing roles and “becoming” different people.  It aired on the Public Broadcasting Service’s American Playhouse.)