A Century of Cosplay: An Introduction
Holly Swinyard/The Editor
It would seem the world has decided to bring back the 20s with a bang. While we were all hoping for flapper dresses and dapper duds, we’ve been given the possibility of world war, economic crash and a pandemic. Well, isn’t that just dandy? It’s not all gloom and doom however, the early 20th century may have had it’s dark parts, but it also brought massive changes in the way pop culture and mass media work, and much the same as now, people were in love with the new technologies and what they could bring to their lives.
In fact people were even cosplaying.
Yes, you heard me right. In the first few decades of the 20th century what we know today as cosplay was invented. While the term itself wasn’t coined until the 1980s, the first costumes we would call cosplay (as opposed to fancy dress) were seen as early as 1908 and 1910! And the very first costume worn to a convention was to the premiere World Science Fiction Convention (World Con) in 1939!
Myrtle R. Douglas attended World Con in costume and continued to promote what we now call cosplay in the many sci-fi zines that she wrote and edited over the next 20 years. It caught on quickly and, by the second World Con, dozens more people had started “fan costuming” as well.. As long as there has been pop culture, there has been cosplay, and as long as there has been media there has been popular culture.
We’ve been having fun in cosplay for a century, let’s celebrate it!
Some of you may have read our history of costume pieces in The Cosplay Journal itself or know something about costume and the place it holds in culture already, but over the next few weeks we are going to do a deep dive into an incredible of cosplay; talking about what was popular, how things evolved, and who was involved in the scene — finding out how we built the community we know and love today.
Let’s start were all the best things start, the beginning – though how long it will take for this series to start jumping all over the place is anyone’s guess. Looking back at the turn of the last century, all the way through to the post wars period in the 1950s and 60s, it’s obvious that this was a time when we saw the world change. Everything from technology and science, to social and political awareness, to fashion and art was turned on its head. This was a revolution, or a series of revolutions in every sense.
Ok, sure, that’s amazing and brilliant and a tad bit mind boggling – though obviously the world didn’t actually exist before colour TV – but why is this important? We’ve all had history lessons. We know this, right? What we need to look closer at is the one big change; the thing that really makes the difference, especially to the development of nerds like us, and that is that the emergence of a mass media.
Suddenly, almost overnight – well over a few decades but, in the grand scheme of things, that’s pretty quick – we had a massive influx of new media. This media was inexpensive to produce, making it accessible to almost everyone; couple that with a massive upwards turn in available education for all and you have everything needed to create popular culture. This is the first time the media is made open to and for the masses.
An image of the Mr Skygack costume from 1908
Books, newspapers, comics, magazines all become mass produced, the print industry exploding as people want more content than ever before. Serialised stories have always been popular, but as literacy rates rose the demand gets higher and higher. Comics, as we now know them, are in every paper, and start to get their own dedicated publications. It is actually from one of these serialised comics that the very first cosplay, mentioned earlier, comes: Mr Skygack, from Mars. It was made and worn by in 1908 to a masked ball in Monroe, Washington, by Mr William Fell. It even won best costume.
As well as mass print media, there’s the wireless. Affordable, instant entertainment. Multiple channels with an enormous choice of what to listen to. Radio allowed for the creation of things never attempted in theatrical productions. You didn’t need theatre sets or costumes, you just needed a mic and a sound booth, and the opportunities were, are, endless.
This is the moment when people from all over the place are actively starting to tune into (pun intended) the same stories at the same time and the creators of these stories are starting to be able to bring different, new, exciting, interesting content to these people. Things they had never dreamed of. The parallels with our present are starkly obvious. Streaming services and social media are making it easier and easier for us to engage with pop culture at all times, couple that with the huge technological advances we are in the midst of and the boom in nerd culture of all kinds is no surprise.
But what does all this have to do with cosplay? Well, everything. Up until now costumes had predominantly been part of masquerade balls, carnivals and theatre. They depicted characters in that production, on that stage, or were traditional characters such as Harlequin from the Commedia Dell’Arte or Louis XIV representing the Sun (see The History of Cosplay in Volume 2 of The Cosplay Journal for an in depth look at this). But these new characters being dreamed up in the media provided new inspiration. They captivated people. Finding out what happened next was as important as it is now, people became enthralled in the radio plays and comic strips – you only have to read about what happened during Orson Welles’ radio production of War of the Worlds to see that. (If you don’t know what happened there, go read about it here!)
Not only were people inspired by these productions (stories have always had that power) but there was also a demand and desire for fans to show their love for the new media in brand new ways. Literary Conventions such as World Con provided a new space for shared discussion, artistic expression and open admiration of these stories. And thus, Fandom, as we know it, was created.
So you have all of the parts required for cosplay. You have mass media and pop culture, with science fiction being most prevalent in that media due to technological advancement. This media is serialised, so people are hooked, invested and in love with the continuing stories. And you have fandom, fans that want to show their love for these characters in every way they can. That is a melting pot ready to bring cosplay to life. If that feels like a similar recipe, it’s because that’s exactly what we have today!
Cosplay did not just burst out of the ground at some point in the 1980s, fully formed and ready to go. Just like any subculture it was born from societal changes, people reacting to what was happening, and a love for what they were doing. It has changed in many ways over the last 100 years, something we will go into more over this series of articles, but we like to think that we’d get on rather well with the fans going to that first World Con, especially Myrtle R. Douglas.
