Switch closet cosplay for the Matrix and Animatrix 35mm screening @therevivalhouseperth last Saturday. There were only a few other people in black trenchcoats that night. I knew I’d be the only one in white.
I have seen a digital screening of the Matrix before, but it does not compare to 35mm. The colours were so rich and deep, it looked like an oil painting. It was great to have a tour of the projection room in the intermission. Revival House is passionate about film preservation.
I’ve been having fun with the closet cosplays recently. Feels good to get back to the way costumes used to be. I am getting tired of the unrealistic standards of modern professional cosplay. It’s wasteful and lacks the fun that costumes are meant to have. I’m considering doing professional photoshoots with my less than accurate costumes.
Cosplay Couture interpretation of Frankenstein’s monster (Eve)
Costume by Courtney Coulson
Make-up by Lauren Payne
Photography by Luke Milton
Location: Carport
Here’s something we’ve been anticipating for around seven months now, having both become obsessed with the Frankenstein novel and all its various interpretations. Mary Shelley’s work differs massively from the classic Universal film which gets the Michael Bay treatment by comparison. Shelley’s monster is eloquent, emphatic, and pendulum swings between sadness and rage. This is the creature we have wanted to create. Huge thanks to the remarkable talents of Lauren from Lollilicious Make Up Artistry who helped make our plans possible through her wonderful work.
-Luke Milton
I’ve completely fallen in love with Frankenstein, the book has no equal and it’s become a great source of inspiration for me. Luke and I also saw the National Theatre play back in November and I was profoundly moved, it really captured the emotional core of Frankenstein and it was after this that the two of us began wondering if there was any way to give the Creature the Cosplay Couture treatment. After watching many, many adaptations seeing what worked and what didn’t, I ended up with a creature of my own. I call her Eve, as the original Creature is sometimes dubbed ‘Adam’, this isn’t intended to be the Bride, rather a genderswapped Creature as I wanted to channel his emotional journey. This was the most physical performance based shoot I have ever done and I loved it, I was also working on a concrete floor on a cold night in a tight costume and it made the experience feel more real, now I want to see what my next big challenge will be.
The costume was mostly inspired by the Creature’s birth, often depicted wrapped in bandages, it’s a stretch cotton bodysuit with something like twenty metres of bronze organza hand wrapped and stitched on top, and it laces up at the back. The Creature’s birth is never really explored in detail and it varies greatly when portrayed on screen, so my interpretation is of a creature suspended by leather harnesses within an artificial womb.
Cosplay Couture interpretation of Tintin and Haddock
Costumes and styling by Courtney Coulson
Haddock by Luke Milton
Photography by Sabatomic Photography
Location: Fremantle docks
For such a simple costume, I am most happy as Tintin, he’s a character I really identify with. And this time Tintin is joined by Haddock and Snowy! As we have already done a couture shoot with Tintin, I thought I would mix things up and go for a more accurate costume. So the styling is relatively understated, but my personal touches are still evident in the velveteen “plus-fours”, leather boots, and camera. Besides this shoot was about debuting Haddock’s costume.
How do you make Haddock look fashionable? It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, the general silhouette and colour pallet is unchanged, but I swapped out the anchor jumper with an anchor t-shirt, which I painted myself. Plus scarves are always a cool accessory.
And introducing Bailey as Snowy, conveniently I just happen to have a little white dog for the part. He wasn’t too difficult to work with, he was pretty anxious about being in a new environment, so he stayed close by, the only challenge was getting him to look at the camera for more than a second.
Courtney Coulson
It’s always a thrill to work with Sab- she is an amazing photographer who understands what we are trying to accomplish and make us look good, It’s also a thrill to be in front of the camera again and getting my Haddock on, thank you for indulging me.
-Luke Milton
It was really fun to get back to shooting. Courtney has amazing dynamic poses and Luke has a wonderfully expressive face.
Cosplay Couture interpretation of Tinker Bell from Peter Pan
Costume and styling by Courtney Coulson
Photography by Luke Milton
Location: University of Western Australia
Tinker Bell is one of those characters that is cosplayed a lot but is hard to do well. Disney makes great business decisions, but sometimes less-than-great creative decisions. The mainstream Tinker Bell has become a spritely valley girl with a posse of fairy friends who are all a vehicle for merchandise. But if you go back to the original book, Tinker Bell is far more volatile. She can be unpredictable, jealous, and vindictive. Tinkerbell has a bite. But there’s also a beautiful, ethereal, otherworldly nature to her. I think our biggest success with this shoot was integrating into our environment and my favourite pictures are those where she is lost in the green.
-Luke Milton
“A girl called Tinker Bell exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage” -Peter and Wendy; J.M Barrie
Tinker Bell has had a fairly consistant, very feminine, silhouette from the beginning. Though she wasn’t the first, she has certainly informed pixies and fairies that came after her visually. I used lace as a nod to skeleton leaves and I imagined she might pick up hints of pollen and other parts of nature, so the sponged on pastel shades are intended to reflect that. As for the wings, the bigger the better! They are constructed from “fantasy film” and wire, by far the most involved aspect of this costume.
Cosplay Couture interpretation of Carrie Kelley as Robin from the Dark Knight Returns
Costume and styling by Courtney Coulson
Photography by Luke Milton
Location Claremont
I’ve always been a huge fan of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns. The female Robin is a nice twist but what I’ve always loved about the design is that it’s very androgynous. As a teenager first seeing Carrie Kelley Robin I wasn’t even sure if it was a boy or a girl. I think it’s the glasses that really make this one. Without them it could be any Robin, but with them it’s definitely Carrie.Location wise the goal was to keep this as absolutely simple as possible. Miller uses very sparse backgrounds, and there’s so much iconic colour in the Robin costume itself that I didn’t want anything competing it. We waited until the sun started going down and tried to get some striking, colourful shots with the Robin character spotlighted.
– Luke Milton
This is my first superhero Cosplay Couture and while I like comic characters, they are re-designed all the time, whether it be by official sources or the fans. They are also very much tied to their specific colour schemes and logos. It’s a bit intimidating to try and adapt to fashion. But there’s something about Carrie that just spoke to me, I love her androgynous look, I love that her costume is just thrown together and mostly from a halloween costume. She’s scrappy, she’s plucky, she’s my Robin.
My intention was to create an outfit that felt as if she had found all these items in her own wardrobe and there are many practical items in this outfit, for example the cape has been replaced with a hood that sits like a collar. But of course I still wanted to keep that sense of fashion, the vest is the statement piece and the utmost attention was payed to the tailoring. Overall the silhouette had to be sleek. As for the make-up, I decided to go with black lipstick as it’s bold and lends itself to the graphic (novel) look.
Cosplay Couture interpretation of Oswin Oswald from Doctor Who
Costume and styling by Courtney Coulson
Photography by Luke Milton
Location: A skatepark and a playground in Claremont
I love Clara in all her incarnations, but it’s Oswin that really captured my imagination. Her look was so iconic and it told you everything you needed to know about her, fun, feminine and a little sporty.
My interpretation is not a massive departure, my main intention was to go formal as Oswin’s costume is quite cheap and the hem is all dirtied up. I went for a darker colour, more like a crimson, the fabric is a net mounted onto cotton to give it a heavier drape and instead of a utility belt I swapped it out for a western style belt, so it still gives that contrast of a feminine dress with a masculine belt.
This is my first Cosplay Couture based on a female character, I don’t know how often I will do that because it felt like half the work was already done for me. But in this instance it’s a character I really love and I wanted to wear this costume to the 50th special screening and that was a lot of fun.
-Courtney Coulson
This shoot was largely improvised and presented a particular challenge for me. I don’t feel like the official Doctor Who publicity photos ever really show costumes in their entirety and they aren’t especially dynamic for the most part. There are plenty of head and shoulders shots of Clara, but nothing that really had me especially inspired. I don’t think that – at this stage in our development anyway – we’re not particularly interested in trying to replicate sets or scenes from the show. I feel that once you start doing that you are back in the realm of cosplay, so instead we were looking for actual nearby locations that perhaps were reminiscent of ideas from the show. I especially liked the plastic playground dome, which gives you a sense of her predicament in her episode, but it using a found environment. And, as always, graffiti walls are a bit of a cliche, but we stumbled upon this dilapidated skate park that was set to be demolished, and I felt that the colours really complimented such a vibrant character. You’ll notice that we shot very hot though – there wasn’t a lot of cover where we were and I was constantly battling a very bright sun. Summer in Perth is horrible for what we are doing!
Cosplay Couture interpretation of Khan Noonien Singh/John Harrison from Star Trek: Into Darkness
Costume (Shirt, jacket and coat) and styling by Courtney Coulson
Photography by Luke Milton
Location Claremont Quarter carpark
I love Star Trek, Benedict Cumberbatch, Khan and the costume designer Michael Kaplan and this year they all came together in one to create a seriously cool villain.
The moment I saw Khan I was in love with his fashion-forward look, Benedict always rocks the long coats and high collars. And that hair, I had to get it cut like that whether I did this shoot or not, it’s so damn cool!
My auburn hair has kind of become a signature part of my look throughout these shoots, but every once in awhile I find it’s not approriate for a certain character, Khan being one of them. I used a temporary rinse, the auburn still kind of shows through, but it’s darker at least.
I spent a long time really considering the designs and styling, I redesigned the silver coat a few times. The black jacket is a reference to the shirt he wears once he has been taken aboard the Enterprise with subtle nods to the other variations of the Starfleet uniform. For these designs I was looking at asymmetry and complex lines, triangular shapes being my main inspiration. There’s something about triangles that are aggressive and masculine to me.
Khan wears five coats in total, two silver, one black and one brown, the fifth being the alternate brown coat he wears in some promotional photos which has a similar but distinctly different look to the one used in the film. My silver coat is a mash-up of all of them. I chose silver because nothing sells the idea of futuristic like silver. The upper half is lined with a silk/cotton which was originally peach, when I dyed it grey it still retained a lot of that pinky quality on the other side. Unfortunately it doesn’t really read on camera but it does have an odd shimmery quality, grey with flecks of pinks and purple. The collar and right lapel is quilted, which was the most time consuming part. The lower half of the coat was left deliberately unlined to keep it as light as possible, it creates quite a dramatic look when walking or it’s windy.
And it was pretty windy when we shot, great for the coat, but not so much for the hair. I had to use so much product and continually comb it to keep it up. Thankfully Khan has it down just as often as he has it slicked back so I had options to play with.
The last time I “played” Benedict, in my Sherlock shoot, I kept the make-up fairly subtle and androgynous, it was all about trying to emulate the shape of his face. This time around I did pretty much the same thing with the exception of the eyes. I went with a really heavy all black smokey eye, because nothing says fashionably badass quite like it!
Finally the biggest challenge turned out to be body language/mannerisms. I have spent quite a while studying the way Khan moves, it’s this distinct, rigid economy of movement. He’s got the posture of a supersoldier as you would expect. Although he gets to move around a lot in combat, his general state of being is standing or sitting perfectly straight with only the slightest robotic tilts of his head. Usually I try to mix a bit of fashion modelling in there, but it felt wrong for Khan, in fact a lot of things did. So Khan ended up being more subtle in a way, I focused on channelling that imposing unnatural posture, the intense facials expressions.
-Courtney Coulson
Courtney is by far a bigger fan than I am of this particular character, and to be honest it wasn’t something I was overly excited about when we first started discussing this one. However, seeing the amazing designs for the jacket quickly changed my mind. I love the sleekness and audaciousness of futuristic clothing – it’s hard thing to get right, but I think Courtney managed to find that balance. I knew straight away that the silver jacket was going to be the star of the shoot and she ended up making the very impressive black under jacket as well.
Location wise this was all about finding sleek, white, metal environments. The car park is a little grungier than I intended but I still think it works. Khan is often seen operating within the futuristic city in the film, so it’s not a bad fit, even when nondescript signage and things appear in the background. I really wanted these to almost look black and white, with the main bursts of colour being the lips and eyes. The goal was to make things as slick as absolutely possible.
Here’s one from the archives, my first photoshoot ever:
Character: Lady Loki (Marvel)
Costume and makeup: by me
Photographer: Jaqueline Auty
Date: 05/05/2012
This one makes me reflect on my costume history. Technically, I have been sewing since I was taught how to in primary school when I was seven years old (we were making felt picture squares for Christmas, mine was a reindeer), after that point I would make my own plush toys by hand, or use those skills to repair holes or attach buttons to my own clothing. I took home economics in high school, where I ambitiously tried to make a silver trenchcoat (look, I was going through my Matrix phase), the results weren’t too bad, wish I still had photos of it.
I then studied fashion design at TAFE in 2009 and that’s when I began cosplaying. I had seen cosplayers at international conventions and thought they were so cool, but Perth didn’t even get a comic convention until 2008, so I never had the opportunity to cosplay myself, nor see other people doing it in person. Our costumes were all rough as hell at that first Supanova, most of us just lazily slapped on some Joker make-up, myself included. It was more akin to what you would expect from a Halloween party, or maybe a Star Trek convention from the 70’s. A part of me actually loves that DIY, improvised look before cosplay became so serious and competitive. I think that spirit is the one I continue on with Cosplay Couture, accuracy doesn’t excite me, assembling an outfit from found items or customising the costume to suit you as an individual, that’s what I love. Thankfully Marvel canonically did that for me.
This shoot was taken around the time the first Avengers movie was released, so the Marvel hype was at an all-time high, and we all loved Loki. I didn’t have to dress up as the male Loki, there was already a female one in the comics and I really liked her design. I assembled this costume while studying costume design at WAAPA, during the long hours sitting around backstage during rehearsals, I would make the chainmail bodice, the first and only time I’ve worked with chainmail, it was difficult, but the results were great. Back then I had dreams of being a professional cosplayer, so I would spend countless hours trying to make elaborate costumes from scratch, I learned a lot of new techniques through trial and error. I made that helmet out of real leather (apparently money was no object?) I created the pattern and everything by myself. The sceptre was the only thing I had help with, I’m still no good with props.
I’m proud of the work I did, that was quite an impressive costume, maybe one of my best. I’m surprised how natural I was in front of the camera considering I had never done any modelling before that. I am accompanied by Ben Gates as Thor and Alex Suriano as Cardboard Iron Man. I don’t see these guys much anymore, but we were part of such a tight friend group back at uni. Life sure changes a lot once you get into your 30’s, huh? Oh no, I can hear the Stand By Me theme somewhere in the distance, I’ll wrap this up.
Here’s a fun discovery, my old tutorial from my now deleted DeviantART account still floats around online:
Normal people take walks and admire the scenery, I find a cool location, go home and come back in costume for a photoshoot. This was about a ten minute walk from my house, I shot this on my phone on a tripod using natural lighting. I couldn’t have asked for a more ideal location, a hidden pit beneath a canopy of trees, right there next to the sidewalk
Costume (pants) by Courtney Coulson Photography by Luke Milton in collaboration with Sabatomic Photography
Shot in Atlantis, the abandoned theme park
Tintin has such a simple yet iconic look with a very distinct colour palette, which made him a perfect candidate for a couture treatment. The sweater was a lucky find on ebay, everything else came from my wardrobe already, including the breeches which were originally from my Road to El Dorado Miguel costume. Hair was tricky to get to stay in place as it was a windy day, fortunatley it’s behaving in these shots. Make-up is light and all pinks to give a more young, cute kind of look, just like Tintin!
-Courtney Coulson
The most hostile environment, where we battled overgrown paths and giant spiders, but what is Tintin without adventure? I was drawn to the odd statues although they are more comical than old-worldly and it was tricky to take out the clues that many of them are near visible shops and car parks. The real treasure was the rocky landscape that we found in the heart of the theme park which looked far more exotic than the rest of it. I think that much of what we shot would look beautiful in black and white but when you lose the iconic colours of Tintin’s costume you risk losing the sense of the character.
Travian Designs 