WTF: Escaflowne Cosplay

From Vision of Escaflowne, we've done a simple Van costume and

have replicated Hitomi's pendant in its series and movie versions.

Please click here for Pendant information.

(With the Van costume, a Dryden costume and a simple Dilandau

costume - as he's seen for only a few moments near the end of the

series - were also done, but they were

composed primarily of

bought pieces, so they're not detailed here).

Van

For the Van costume, we started with a bought pair of pants, gauntlets

that I'd acquired for a Darth Maul costume the year before, a re-cut and

re-styled Elvis wig (no, really), and a red T-Shirt. (I offered my husband

a pair of boots that more closely resembled Van's, but he opted for his

own comfortable sneakers, since he was wearing the costume at

Anime Expo, where we'd be walking a lot.)

With a little cutting and hand-sewing on ribbon, the T-Shirt became more

Van-like.

The shirt alone would be $10-$15, depending on the price of the plain T-shirt.

We acquired a set of wings from a costume shop for this outfit.

Unlike most other winged Vans we'd seen, we decided to use outstretched

wings - these proved as unweildy in crowds as many wings, but did look

good... :-) However, the rental for the wings was $60, and it would have

been $130 to buy them. Had we had the time, we probably would've made

our own wings, but between materials and labor, the cost would probably

have been about the same as buying them. (Still, we hope one day to

create articulated feathered wings...) ;-)

The wings had wide elastic straps that connected with Velcro to go around

the shoulders. We decided that we didn't want these straps to show, so

we cut holes in the back of the shirt to thread the straps through. We then

sacrificed a pair of tube socks to make coverings for the straps, so that

they'd be comfortable enough to wear all day.

Lastly, for the Van costume, a Hitomi pendant was required. (In every image

we could find that showed Van with his wings out and his shirt on, he was

wearing the pendant.) At the time, we had no luck finding an appropriate

bead, so we used... a nice heavy solid-glass Christmas bulb pendant/ornament

that I had randomly acquired two years before (long before I'd ever seen

any Escaflowne). It was a little oddly shaped, but it looks just fine in the

pictures. :-)