Every Friday at 6 p.m., James Blair Hall room 229 transforms into a creative workshop full of fabric, wigs and costuming expertise. The College of William and Mary’s Costuming Club is home to cosplayers of all genres, and members boast costume designs based on Disney characters, anime video games, horror podcasts and more.
Costuming Club’s weekly meetings teach members important costuming skills and help them prepare cosplays for conventions. Whatever the niche interest and experience level, Costuming Club welcomes any student excited to learn more about the imaginative world of cosplaying.
“Cosplay is really just meant to be a fun way to express your love of some form of media,” Costuming Club president Alex Vuono ’25 said.
Costuming Club Vice President Anaya Temple ’25 began cosplaying in sixth grade with cosplay YouTube videos and Disney princess dresses. Temple later evolved into crafting more intricate, handmade designs, including Te Ka and Tefiti from “Moana,” upon joining Costuming Club at the College.
She especially prides herself on her Te Ka costume, detailing the painstaking process of creating the character from sketch to final product. After researching and sketching a concept, the building began. For fabric-based costumes like Te Fiti, Temple brainstorms what fabrics suit characters best.
“A lot of the process is just me looking at the character and thinking what would go best with them,” Temple said. “Once I have that all together, I spend lots of time and lots of money trying to bring it to life.”
Vuono also found her love of cosplaying in middle school.
“I found a lot of myself through that community. Ironically enough, sometimes the best way to figure out who you are is to dress up like somebody else,” Vuono said.
By the time Vuono joined Costuming Club at the College, she had been immersed in the cosplay sphere for five years, sparked by her interests in anime and video games. Her first trip to Nekocon, Virginia’s longest-running anime convention, during seventh grade introduced her to the costuming community and the exciting possibilities for crafting costumes.
“It was absolutely amazing, and I had such a great experience,” Vuono said. “I met a lot of people there, and I realized that there was actually a strong community within it, built on a lot of really cool skills.”
Vuono cosplayed as Will Turner from the “Pirates of the Caribbean,” Azul Ashengrotto from the Japanese mobile game “Disney Twisted-Wonderland” and Gerard Keay from horror podcast “The Magnus Archives” for this year’s Nekocon.
“One of my favorite things is going to a convention, dressing up as some obscure book character or whatever and then I find someone who might not even be dressed from the same fandom that immediately recognizes me, and we get to nerd out for hours about our shared interest,” Vuono said.
The Nekocon convention is Vuono’s favorite to attend and one of the two major cosplay conventions Costuming Club visits every year. Katsucon, hosted in National Harbor, Maryland, is the second main event. Last year, the club competed and performed in the Katsucon Masquerade competition and brought home a win in the intermediate Journeyman category with its comedy skit performance, an anime villain spoof on “Better Call Saul.”
As head of the club’s Convention Committee, Temple is largely responsible for taking care of convention-related tasks, including securing tickets and transportation, and helping members with anything they need to start and finish their costumes. Vuono explained that, before going to conventions, experienced executive officers will hold presentations during weekly meetings to help members with navigating the venue’s layout and to provide safety tips so everyone can have the best experience.
When the club is not preparing for a convention, its weekly skill workshops teach members sewing, prop making, makeup and wig styling. Last year, Vuono brought in bags of old unused wigs, curling irons, straightening irons and combs and held a wig styling workshop for members to experiment with using different techniques they had learned from previous meetings.
No matter the form of media, Costuming Club has a member experienced in the field ready to help new cosplayers.
“Everyone knew a lot about different niche topics, whether it was sewing, or prop making, or makeup,” Costuming Club Secretary Tyler Blessington ’25 said.
Beginners are welcomed and encouraged by the club to learn any and all new skills regardless of their prior costuming experience. Blessington had never costumed before joining the club at a friend’s suggestion but was inspired to keep learning after attending a few workshops. For new cosplayers, Blessington’s advice is to not worry about skill level and enjoy the social aspect.
“I definitely found it as a greater outlet for that — a way to use that skill in a way that I can be proud of, creating something that other people would have a lot of appreciation for outside of just a practical usage,” Blessington said. “It’s also good to talk about it with other people and friends that are also in that general scene.”
Costuming Club brings together costumers of all interest, and it strives to be a no-judgement space where threads of creativity can run wild and tangle into new ideas.
“I have met, genuinely, some of my absolute best friends through this club,” Vuono said. “It has always been a place where I could go, and really feel at home with people. Obviously, we poke fun at each other as all friends do, but there’s no judgment, there’s no, ‘oh, this is weird.’”
Current executive board members hope to continue the positive environment that welcomed them in as freshmen so students always know they have a creative safe haven where they are free to be who they are and make who they are not.
“We make sure that people who maybe wouldn’t indulge their interest in it normally get the opportunity to see what’s up. Even if they don’t continue with it after college, it can still be a really fun place to try something new and try to be creative in very unique ways,” Vuono said.