Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity
So, in case you didn’t know, I’m a writer. I write nonfiction books that are deep anthropological studies of popular culture as contemporary mythology. That’s why this channel is called Incidental Mythology - its a study of our mythology, which just happens to be our myths through the connections we form through it, incidentally.
Recently, I published a new book. I started this research about four years ago. It’s an anthropological study of cosplay, looking at it as a demonstration of mythic performance. If popular culture is our mythology, than performing the characters and elements from these myths would be a form of mythic performance. The rest of this video essay is going to be an excerpt from the book, with a few alterations to make it make sense outside of its original context. The images of cosplayers you are going to see were very kindly allowed for my use by the cosplayer photographers who took them, and they are all featured in the book as well. If you want to hear more, you can go buy my book because it’s already out now! Available anywhere you buy your books. Anyway. I hope you like it.
Many would say the art of cospay began in the 1980s and ‘90s with the rise of mainstream mass pop culture media alongside the growth of fan conventions and comic cons. While this was when the term ‘cosplay’ was coined, there has been a long history of people dressing up as fictional characters. We could, of course, begin by drawing connections to traditional dances and performances of mythical characters and stories, though for now I will put that aside. Even without this influence, similar circumstances of ceremonial and artful dressing of characters can be traced to the Carnival of Venice, whose many stock characters and masks create an environment for individuals to feel more like themselves in society.
Obviously, the history of cosplay is also dependent on its definition. When thinking about the history of dressing in special outfits, we would have to consider the extensive background of folk costumes. But if we stick to the typical understanding of cosplay as dressing as fictional characters for a particular event of common interest, we also see this reaching far earlier than the 1980s. In March 1877, Jules Verne hosted his first masked ball, where attendees dressed as characters from his books. Masquerades in general were sometimes used as opportunities for attendees to dress as characters from literature, literally masking their identity in their outfits. In 1912, August Olson dressed as Mr Skygack, a comic strip character, at a masquerade. Even in terms of of fan conventions, the history is longer than one may think. The first cosplayer is often thought of as being Myrtle R. Douglas, who cosplayed alongside her then boyfriend Forrest Ackerman at Worldcon in 1939.
The history of cosplay is long and complicated because the exact nature of cosplay, as opposed to other forms of dressing up, is also rather difficult to untangle. Cosplay has a lot of similarities with other forms of what I like to call “dress plays”: activities where individuals dress with the purpose of playing around with identity. Drag, live action role play, and historical re-enactment are just three examples of different forms of dress play which have intersecting moments with cosplay.
The reason why drag, LARP, re-enactment, and even TTRPGs, and other forms of dress play are so complicated is because dressing is such an important part of our lives as social beings. A lot of studies of fashion and dress talk about how fashion is a form of communication. As fashion scholar Malcolm Barnard puts it, fashion is what makes ‘us’ into ‘us’. It becomes a form of identity creation and cohesion, and allows people who are ‘us’ to recognise ‘us’, while also making it very clear to ‘them’ that they are not ‘us.’
People have been using dress in this way for a very long time. Religious dress is often the marker of the in-group versus out-group, as well as a way of communicating beliefs and worldviews. The hijab, for example, is not only a marker of Muslim identity, but carries with it the implicit and multifaceted meanings behind the hijab. We seldom wear something just to wear it.
When we get dressed, it is not just the clothes we must consider. Clothes gon on to a body. It is through our bodies that we see, and are seen by, the world. Seeing me is also seeing my body and seeing the dressing on my body. Anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote about how we all have two bodies: a physical one and a social one. The social body in many ways controls the way our physical bodies are read and understood by the people around us. Our physical experiences and understanding of our physical body are always ‘clothed’ by our social categories and social worlds. In many ways, there is no such thing as a nude body, because we are always clothed in these thoughts and considerations. Douglas’s two bodies are always in interaction and communication with each other, constantly reinforcing the categories of one on to the other. Essentially, our bodies are more than biological mechanisms. They are also social tools for communication and categorisation. For example, my gender is inscribed as both a social body and a physical body, and which gender I am is read through the social and used as a way to assume aspects of my physical. But the social dynamic of gender is always present, informing and altering aspects of the physical understanding.
Cosplay also reveals the intricate relationship between body and dressing. Many participants have expressed a change in their confidence when cosplaying, even when outside of cosplay. My participant Grayson, for example, told me that “cosplay’s about being, like, giving that extra boost of confidence as well”. In fact, the confidence gained through cosplaying was Grayson’s favourite and most notable part of it. “For me, particularly, it would be the confidence… in body. Confidence. Because I feel like I’m more confident as that character. I feel more pretty as that character. I feel more… I feel like I’m more accepted as that character than I am myself.” The art of dressing, and the performance associated with it, have an impact not only on the performance but on the body which did the dressing. You can’t really talk about dress without tlaking about the body, and the way dressing impacts the body and the body impacts the dressing. Cosplayers will, for example, transform a costume to have a head covering for people who culturally wear a head covering, or use either wigs or natural hair for Black cosplayers. In these instances, the body of the cosplay is also impacting the way the dressing happens. Cosplay is ultimately an activity which incorporates elements of the body, the art of dressing, and the performance associated with the body and dress.
When a cosplayer inhabits the identity of the dress of the character, their body is still the cosplayer’s. This means there is a complicated double relationship of communication happening with cosplayers - not only are they performing the identity of the character, but they are also performing the identity of themselves. The cosplayer’s body is still there, and still communicating certain relationships these types of bodies have with the social worlds around them; the body’s abilities or disabilities, skin colour, and gender all impact the way the social world understands them, even when in cosplay. But the character’s identity is tied in with this communication.
This means there are two ways cosplayers can understand their own body’s relationship to the original media to create a new text in their representation: the first is in direct imitation, where they endeavour to maintain ‘accuracy’ to the original, including costumes, performances and the body; and the second is in textual transformation, where the cosplayer takes advantage of the differences between the original text and themselves to adapt it. Of course, these aren’t exclusive categories. Cosplayers can fall into both types depending on the cosplay they are doing, as well as delving into and out of these categories depending on the act they are doing. Hey may seek to be more like direct imitation when taking photos, but happy to be adaptive at cons, for example.
Cosplay may, on the surface, appear as a light-hearted aspect of dressing up. I remember when I had a conversation with someone about this project while I was researching, we started chatting about the intricate and complicated nature of cosplay. This person I was chatting to, at the end, said, in surprise, “I guess it’s more than just dressing up, then.” It is important to note that there is no such thing as “just” dressing up. Dress itself has a detailed sociology that helps us demonstrate to others who we are, and it’s all on our body, which is also read and understood on a variety of different levels such as gender, race, ability or disability, and economic status.
The history of cosplay is long, and potentially much longer if we continue to look down the history of mythic performances. But even if we don’t, it’s far longer than just the 1980s and ‘90s, and mostly it is because people have always intuitively known the importance of dressing the body, and the way this communicates a variety of beliefs, ideas, and actions.
We think of things as special: we have specialised actions and thoughts and beliefs and connections to our mythic fictions. And dressing as this fictionalised Other can change us, because our body and our dress are an important way of communicating ourselves. Changing these things can actively change the way our identities are understood and read by others. There is something more about masked performances than just wearing a mask. Likewise, there is something more about cosplay than just wearing a costume.