Anime Fancy Dress!

As a nation we all love dressing up! From birthdays, to stag do’s and hen nights, to Halloween and Christmas, or just wanting to jazz up those mundane routine Friday nights out, fancy dress has become a favorite past time for many Brits both young and old alike.

Some people get REALLY get in to the whole fancy dress UK scene with things such as Anime conventions, and Fantasy reenactments. The Warwick arts Centre are holding an Anime convention from 19-21^st August this year that will see thousands of devout anime fans turns up in the most elaborate and expensive fancy dress costumes in order to impersonate their favorite anime characters.

Most popular characters people impersonate are ‘Cloud’ from the Infamous Final Fantasy games and film, Light Yagami and the illusive L from the hit Japanese comic and cartoon series ‘Death note’ and of course no anime convention would be complete without a few Kai’s from Dragonball Z running around, along with a few Pokémon too! Fans really do go to town when re creating there favorite anime characters costumes, everything down to the spiky mo-hawkesk hair of Cloud, right down to the makeup simulating the signature over sized eyes of most anime characters you will encounter.

To give you a little more background, ‘Death Note’ is an anime series and Japanese comic book by Tsugumi Ohba and drawn by Takeshi Obata in 2006. Most fans opt to dressed up as one of the death Gods or ‘Shinigami’ (as known in the comic) named ‘Ryuk’.

Ryuk is a giant, demon looking Death God, dressed entirely in black PVC, with skulls on his wrists, belt and chains and really spiked out black shoulder cuffs with a spiky white collar to match. He has jet black spiked up hair that stands on end, a white face, piggy nosed, black lips and eyeliner, glowing red googerly eyes, and giant black claws. As you can tell from the description this would be one hell of a costume to re create. But many anime fans love characters like this and often imitate the harder costumes the most as they see it as a challenge and love to outdo each other!

Ryuk also has a female counter part called ‘Rem’, who is similar in appearance but has alot more white PVC to her costume along with a large hoop through one year, thick tubes of white with purple tips for her hair, yellow cat like eyes, and two rows of stitching around her neck. Anime couples often sport this combo at the conventions as the two characters are Death Gods and do have a weird attraction to each other.

Although they are not the main characters like Light Yagmi (also known as Kira), L (also known as Hideki Ryuga) and Misa Amane (also known as the second Kira), they are the most popular at such conventions, as the other main characters although more integral to the plot don’t really have much of theme with their costumes. Therefore the outlandish and exhibitionist amine fans can’t have as much fun when re creating there outfits, so don’t! Ace fancy dress, also do amazing anime outfit if you don’t want to go to all that effort and time!

Maria works for Ace fancy dress and is a huge lover of anime and all things fancy dress UK