Conventions were once a ‘nerdy’ event that not many people attended. Today, they are still ‘nerdy’, but as the subject matter of such conventions becomes the center of popular culture, the number of people attending them has increased dramatically. A very large part of these events and many fans’ engagement with popular culture texts in today’s current pop culture landscape, is the art of ‘cosplay’.
Cosplay, which was coined by Nov Takahashi, a contraction of the English-language words ‘costume’ and ‘play’, began in 1939 “at the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York… Forrest J Ackerman and his friend Myrtle R. Jones appeared in the first S[cience] F[iction] costumes among the 185 attendees. … [Ackerman] was dressed as a rugged looking star pilot, and [Jones] was adorned in a gown recreated from the classic 1933 film Things to Come.” Takashi was said to be inspired by “hall and masquerade costuming at the 1984 Los Angeles SF Worldcon.” when coining the phrase, cosplay. While his reports of it in Japanese science fiction magazines “sparked the Japanese cosplay movement.” (costuming.org, 2005)
Many people don’t know where cosplay originated from, and mistakenly believe that it originated in Japan. This is not the case, Japanese fans of manga and anime heard about what was happening at Worldcon in America in 1984 through Takashi’s reporting, and decided it would be fun to take it up themselves. Takashi did however coin the phrase cosplay.
After the popularity of cosplay in Japan, cosplay began to spread across the world again as anime and manga also gained popularity in western countries, all occurring in the mid-1990’s. This allowed for the reintroduction of cosplay to western countries, hence the re-popularisation of cosplay today.
Here is an example of some cosplay:
– Unknown. “The History of Costuming.” 2005. Available at: http://www.costuming.org/history.html