Cosplay any day: the growing community bringing costumes to the streets

UpdatedSat, October 31, 2026 at 12:02 AM UTC

Willow* and her friends know they are always the first to be spotted in a crowd. They don’t mind the stares.

Sitting at the steps of Sydney’s town hall, the trio are an island of pastel pink, lavender and fiery red, the intensity of their wigs matched by the extravagance of their makeup. Willow’s face is artfully made up, her eyes embellished with bright blue eyeshadow, thick winged eyeliner and spiky false lashes. A pair of platform Converse lifts her an extra 5cm above ground.

Today she is cosplaying as Rainbow Dash from the television series My Little Pony. For an evening on Earth, Willow stands out, but in Equestria – the land Rainbow Dash hails from – she blends in.

Cosplay, a portmanteau of “costume” and “play”, is simply dressing as a favourite hero or character from a piece of media, says the Japanese literature, popular culture and cosplay academic Emerald L King. It’s different from other kinds of dress up, because there’s “an element of gathering with other people,” says King. The play often involves others, either as collaborators or audience, and photoshoots are central in this.

Dennis, who asked to be referred to by his first name only, is a Sydney-based cosplayer and appreciates the way costumes allow him to embody characters he already sees in himself. “The way they’re written really mirrors a lot of my qualities and also my faults … They’re sort of like a distant clone of myself.”

This sentiment resonates with Willow, who says cosplay is central to her self-expression: “Sometimes I’ll be like, ‘I need to cosplay them because they’re literally me in a different medium.’”

Around twice a month, Willow and her friends pose in high-concept photoshoots around the city. There’s no crew, nor formal camera gear, just them deciding on which locations and poses match the characters they’re cosplaying as on the day. Roaming around the city in full cosplay is an average day for Willow, one of a growing group of people who are cosplaying outside large-scale comic convention events.

King says she has observed this return to “smaller, more casual meets”, which were a mainstay of the Australian cosplay scene in the early 2000s. Nocti*, a Melbourne-based cosplayer, has also noticed an increase in fan-hosted events. “It’s a way of escapism. So they just want to dress up as a character that they really like for a day and hang out with their friends.”

Says King: “People are moving away from convention spaces because they’re crowded … and you can’t do as much of the creative storytelling work that people are now turning to in their shoots.”

In Australia, there are four main anime and pop culture conventions. While they are spread out across the year, Shelley, a cosplayer based in Canberra, who asked to be referred to by her first name only, says people no longer want to wait for conventions to cosplay and meet with friends. She is the admin for an Instagram page and Discord server that promotes cosplay meet-ups around the country, and over the past two years has received more requests from the community to share their events. Since taking over the page in 2021, she says the group of cosplayers and photographers has grown from 40 to over 1,000.

As Japanese popular culture and general nerd culture has become more mainstream, cosplay has become more accessible, says King. If someone is interested in cosplaying, these casual gatherings offer a lower barrier to entry and buy-in – the average price for a multi-day pass at one of the major conventions is $70. The real cost is the costumes, though; it is normal to have a different outfit for each day of a convention – usually spanning three days. For Nocti, the price of a costume can range from $50 to $300, depending on how elaborate it is. Willow says during out-of-con meet-ups, the cosplay is usually more casual, though it still takes her up to one-and-a-half hours to get ready.

Nocti and Shelley say regular meet-ups make it easier to develop long-term friendships in the wider cosplay community – they’re where Shelley met her husband.

Meet-ups tend to be more tightknit and often centre around one piece of media, says Nocti. Conventions, on the other hand, bring together many different fandoms such as Naruto, Demon Slayer or Genshin Impact.

Dennis says it feels empowering to see people cosplaying in unexpected spaces.

He says it “feels like we just literally popped out of the screen and just jumped right into real life”. It’s particularly satisfying when his character is recognised by a stranger: “It feels like you’re kind of conversing with them in the same exact language.”

Willow initially started cosplaying because she wanted to “dress up and stand out amongst the crowd”, but now she does it to “just be” with the friends she has met. Nowadays, she says, “I’m more connected to the people rather than the actual characters.”