Faun:
Retro Popism:
Cosplayers at a StarCraft convention, 1976
In this house we have endless respect for the cosplayers who lived before the advent of video cameras.
You can’t just rewatch the episode to see all the details of the costumes. You got lucky and a press photo appeared in a magazine, or you just watched the series/movie while sketching like crazy
Consider the woman who built a Star Wars flight suit in 1977 entirely from trading cards and sketching details in a theater. Or I’ve heard stories about old-school Trek cosplayers getting weird seam placement right by copying magazines onto transparencies and projecting them onto butcher paper.
I’m a semi-old-school cosplayer (since 2001), so some of the old-school techniques are still things I learned (I sketched while paused from a stuttered VHS tape and used overhead transparency Techniques)…what we have access to Costume Entertainment is now out of their league when it comes to reference materials alone, let alone specialty costume supplies like thermoplastics and cosplay wigs.
