Costumes Everywhere

Who doesn’t like to dress up? OK, probably most of the folks who hang out over on Server Fault. But here at Worldcon, it seems like you see people wearing costumes all the time. The Masquerade (a huge event, held earlier tonight) is devoted to extravagant and innovative costuming, in individual and group concepts. Sadly, we missed the Masquerade, though we’ll link to photos as we find them.

An attraction of Science Fiction and Fantasy conventions are “hall costumes,” many of which are simply stunning. Surprisingly, we’ve seen only a few Klingons; perhaps they’re going out of style. And we fully expected to see more than a few Na’vi, but haven’t seen any (our guess: all that blue paint gets pretty messy; it’s just not that practical). The biggest contingent here seems to be the steampunk crowd—one of the costume vendors, Damsel in this Dress, snarkily claims that steampunk is what happens when Goths discover brown.

We’ve seen dozens of cool costumes (all of which have made us regret our decision to rely on our iPhone 4s; while they have a decent camera, our Canons would have been better).

Three examples:

Waiting for the shuttle bus to the convention center today, we struck up a conversation with this woman who made a beautiful headdress from leather and then painted it with exacting detail and subtlety.

Painted leather headdress at Renovation

In the hall outside one of the convention parties, another leather creation—this time a jerkin—nicely detailed and painted.

Painted leather jerkin at Renovation

But our favorite hall costume so far was worn by this woman dressed as the TARDIS from Doctor Who. Just like the… er… real TARDIS, the light on her head pulsed when she chose to transport away, and it even made the TARDIS sound! Truly a delightful costume. You can’t see it in this picture, but her dress even included the door handles and the sign on the front of the police box.

Woman dressed as a TARDIS at Renovation

Conventions

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