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| (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.
