The Origin Of Cosplay

         (Photo by Robert Madle)

So one of the big questions for people new to cosplay is, how did cosplay start? This is quite a simple question but at the same time one that is hard to answer. There are no big history books that carry within their pages the exact date that someone decided to put on a costume of one of their favorite movie characters. It seemed like at the moment no one really thought it would be an important thing to note down. So we can only really approximate of what the answer to that is. A lot of people pin down the date to the First World ScienceFiction Convention (later known as WorldCon) in 1939. Yes, 1939. And the person, they say, is Forrest J Ackerman, also known as the world's biggest fanboy. His costume? Well it was a homemade spaceman outfit from one of his favorite movie. It's been said that since then people have pulled an Ackerman and dressed up at conventions. However, it wasn't known as cosplay until 1983 when a Japanese man, Nobuyuki Takahashi, coined the term after seeing people dressed at a science fiction convention in Los Angeles. He basically combined the words “costume” and “play” to describe what these people at the conventions were doing. He used this term in an article he wrote for a Japanese magazine called My Anime. Since then it has been known as cosplay.


Cosplay gained a lot of popularity back in Japan, with people mostly dressing up as characters from the popular Gundam anime. However, cosplay in Japan began to range and it became people dressing up as a variety of things, not just anime characters. Cosplay in America and cosplay in Japan differ quite a bit. Japan considers any type of dressing up as cosplay, so basically any type of costume. However, here in America we do not refer to dressing up on Halloween as cosplay, or at other similar events. Cosplay here seems to only be specific to conventions or convention related events such as gatherings. Since we think of cosplay as something that started at a convention, we tend to keep it associated with conventions.

(Photographer Unknown)

Cosplay is now growing bigger than expected. It is not only found in Japan or America but in other countries as well. I recently saw a video of cosplayers in Israel and it has surprised me how far this idea has managed to travel. Many countries all over the world are holding anime or comic conventions and a lot of these people going to these conventions go in cosplay. I think the awareness of cosplay in other countries is partly due to the great acess the internet gives us. The internet is a great window into the cosplay culture and I think that it will be one of the biggest factors that will help cosplay grow. I think that we should really start documenting the world of cosplay because soon it will cease to be as underground as it is now.