History of cosplay

Who do you think is the most popular people in Disneyland? The person who in Micky’s body! Play a role as Micky actually is the behavior of early cosplay.

Cosplay is a word short of costume play, which created by a Japanese animator named Nobuyuki Takahashi in a meeting of World Science Fiction in Los Angeles in 1984.Cosplay is an activity in which people wear costumes, wigs and other accessories to play a character from a fiction book,a movie, a mystery story, a history story, idol groups or a game,it is a kind of Non-mainstream culture. People who have this activity are called cosplayer, I am a cosplayer, for this opportunity, I would like to let all of you know what is cosplay, who is playing cosplay and how fun of it!

Everything has its own history, cosplay is no exception. In fact, there is just about 30 years that contemporary costume play appeared. But if we focus on the past time and retrospectively, we can find many information in the Internet, indeed, cosplay has a long history. In an article we can learned that the earliest cosplay activities appeared several centuries ago, like the Troubadour in Ancient Greek, they advertised Odyssey and Iliad by play a role from those Epic. In contemporary cosplay, the first cosplay character is Micky Mouse in Disneyland. Micky born in 1928 and when he successed ,he became a part of childhood in most people’s life. A host of Disneyland thought that: ”why don’t we let Micky become a real person that kids can touch them and play with them?” then, we have the guy in Micky’s body! Thereafter Micky of cosplay’s appeared, it gave Disneyland huge economic benefits. With the success of Micky, people found costume play was interesting. With the flow of information, we know so many excellent comic books, mystery movies, novels all over the world, messages from social media, as a consequence，costume play onto the world’s stage.

In 1947, God of Comic----Japan cartoonist Osamu Tezuka’s comic book, " New Treasure Island" hard-edged, set off a hot wave of contemporary comics. Thus creating the Japanese ACG market boom. Just at that moment, the kind of activities that Disney made, have been introduced to Japan. And now, cosplay become a norm activity in Japan.

In Japan, the earliest Cosplay appeared in about 1955, when many children are dressed costumes from characters from " Moonlight Mask " and " Youth Jeter ”. They made their costumes by themselves, or drew costumes on a paper and asked tailors help them to make it. Because that time, Japan did not have 

companies do those things.

This situation has continued for nearly 20 years, until the late 1970s to the early 1980s, after exploring and growing, Japan’s ACG became bigger and bigger.

The general Cosplay including animation, comics, games , video games, novels, movies, TV series , tokusatsu(like a superman fight with a monster, both of those character are player by a real person), idol group , occupation, historical stories, social stories. People want to play a role, want to act the character, so they dress in some similar costumes, have make-ups, build body language, wear wigs, and so on.

 This is a short video from YouTube，it shows some interesting cosplay photos.