The joy of dressing up in a costume is as old as time. This timeline traces a history of cosplay.
For many people, cosplay starts with the source material: the films, games, books or comics — in any genre imaginable — that feature a beloved character. Studying that source material closely often takes many hours, after which it can take weeks or months more to recreate the chosen character’s costume as precisely as possible.
Early academic writing on cosplay tends to be fairly simplistic about why people choose a particular costume: a cosplayer is such a devoted fan that they want to embody the character. But the conversations we had with cosplayers for this exhibition revealed far more varied motivations behind costume choices. Cosplayers pick a character because they want to set themselves a technical challenge, because they want to head to a convention in matching costumes with a group of friends, or to boost their chances of winning a competition.
For some cosplayers, the main goal when making a costume is screen accuracy: recreating exactly what appears in the source material. This is an important judging criterion in many cosplay contests. But for plenty of others, exact recreation isn’t the priority at all. In fact, for many cosplayers, the creative interpretation of a character is a big part of the fun.
That can take all sorts of forms. Take mash-ups, for instance, where two different characters are combined into one new costume. This can be a way of tapping into current events or trends: while Joost Klein was competing in the Eurovision Song Contest, there were plenty of mash-ups featuring his distinctive broad-shouldered Europapa costume. In November and December, you’ll spot Sinterklaas mash-ups at plenty of conventions. It can also be a way of showing your love for two different characters at once. Creative interpretation can also come from combining styles. What would a medieval version of a 21st-century character look like? Or a romantic gothic take on a character that’s drawn as thoroughly futuristic in the source material?
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