More than one dozen times this year, 21-year-old Rachel Grady transformed herself into an animated character. After covering her hazel eyes with brightly colored contacts and perfecting her costume makeup, she would put on a handmade outfit just like the clothes of one of her favorite fictional characters. As a final touch, she hid her hot pink hair under a wig.
"I’ve always been into anime comics and cartoons. I grew up watching them and reading them," Grady said. "I always wanted to dress as them for Halloween, but I didn’t know there was a category where if you did it not during Halloween, it was cosplay."
Grady first cosplayed at the San Diego Comic Con in 2009 after seeing the photos her friends posted on Myspace of costumed convention participants the year before. Now she attends more than 12 conventions each year, wearing costumes she’s sewn herself.
"I can crank out something in a week, but a healthy amount of time would probably be a month," Grady said. Over the past 12 months, she has made more than 20 outfits. "I kind of went overboard this year."
Grady researches each character she wants to cosplay, gathering multiple images and angles of an outfit to break down the costume she wants to create. When the planning is over, Grady heads to the Los Angeles Fashion District to find the fabric she needs. Once she starts sewing, comfort and practicality usually comes second to accuracy.
"The clothes are unrealistic, but most times cosplayers don’t make the clothes where they are meant to be comfortable," Grady said. "With regular clothes, if it doesn’t work then it’s just not feasible. But here we just try to figure out how to make anime clothing come to life, because this doesn’t exist in real life."
Grady didn’t always make her own outfits. She slowly taught herself to sew by customizing pieces of clothing to make simple costumes. "I recommend people start out with 'closet cosplay.' You go to the thrift store and put together a costume like Ash Ketchum, where it’s not necessarily that you have to sew the whole thing," she said.
Grady’s roommate Gina Luzi has completed around 15 of her own costumes this year. "I will watch something and fall so much in love with a character that I’m not going to be happy until I am that character," she said. "If you like a character that much, that’ll drive you to finishing the costume."
Each costume costs Luzi roughly $60 to make, but some are cheaper because she reuses certain elements from outfit to outfit. Luzi knew how to sew high school, but she had to relearn the craft when she became interested in cosplay two years after graduating and moving to Los Angeles.
"I went to Comikaze 2011 with my roommates at the time and they threw together cosplays really fast and I just went in my normal clothes," Luzi said. "I think it was my second time going to a convention, but it never really crossed my mind to actually cosplay."
Though Grady and Luzi have traveled as far as Atlanta for a convention, many of the events are in California, and specifically, Los Angeles. "Little Tokyo is a really hot spot for cosplayers to go and have a fun day out. Almost on the daily, I run into cosplay friends who come down there," Grady said.
Little Tokyo is also home to Anime Jungle, a store dedicated specifically to cosplay. Grady began working there as a salesperson two months ago. "Anime Jungle is really famous nationwide, but also among anime and cosplay fans," she said. "Lots of tourists come through and they’re very excited. They just want to dress up but they never know how because not everyone knows how to sew."
Anime has permeated other areas of American fashion as well, with brands like superOrange selling merchandise with Japanese words commonly found in anime placed in the middle of English phrases. "Now that people want to incorporate anime into their fashion, you have really cute dresses that look like Sailor Moon’s dress but it’s just like a print-on, so it’s something you could wear every day," Grady said.
Grady thinks the rising presence of anime in mainstream fashion represents an increasing interest in Japanese culture. "Anime has gotten so much more popular than it used to be, because it used to be a very small niche that would like it," she said. "In recent years, now you can find anime things in Hot Topic. You can say the word cosplay and most people will know what you’re talking about."