started: Spring 2020 | con debut: ECCC 2025 | last worn: ECCC 2025
Thank you, JoJo's Bizarre Encyclopedia
Early 2020 I am convinced by my friend to try watching anime again. I don't recall the specific pitch for Jojo's Bizarre Adventure but he is very sure I will enjoy this piece of media and I acquiesce reluctantly, already feeling the bile reserved for Trigun Guys Telling Me I Don't Understand Art rising in my throat. I needn't have worried. I am visually captivated by this thing almost immediately. The plot is a great thrill but secondary to the visceral pleasures of the animation, the oddly stilted / beautifully posed action, the relentless and surreal body-horror. Watching Phantom Blood is like crawling inside the skull of Dr. Frank N. Furter, experiencing the fever dream of an alien who learned about human society exclusively via gay muscle-man porn, fashion magazines, and cheap horror movies.
(Why not cosplay Dio, then? Fine, sure. Someday, no doubt.)
By the time Joseph Joestar arrives on screen for the second part, Jojo's has already reserved a space in my brain forever. I have to overcome the temptation to immediately rewatch Phantom Blood rather than moving on, but I have the accountability of a friend-recommendation to keep things moving. All the same I am glad for Joseph as a brilliant contrast to Jonathan: he does not make me miss the last protagonist, and his personality allows the story to comfortably lean even further into the wackier contrivances of the plot. He's funny and smart but in an annoying way, he's roguish and smug, he has a little more pointed character development (in the sense of clearly learning moral lessons and becoming a better person; I assert that Jonathan simply overcomes increasingly difficult combat challenges with his already-heroic spirit). Jojo's continues to get more enjoyable for me, generally, throughout Part 2.
It is at some point during my viewing of Battle Tendency that society abruptly stops and I am confined alone in my apartment with only my thoughts (of either the impending epidemic collapse of society or of this anime) by government order. I'm sure that has little to do with the hold Jojo's has on me mentally for the next several years.
All that aside there is the matter of the scarf. Look at this thing.
No wait look at it move:
Completely independent from physical reality. It streams gloriously behind him like a gladiator's cape, it flutters lightly to emphasize his speed yet it settles in artfully rich folds across his neck. It is, as far as I can tell, wrapped around his ample shoulders at least twice and additionally hangs at least to his knees. Or it's possibly wrapped once but at least twice as wide at the neck than it is at the ends? All in all it does not conform to the physical laws governing fabric behavior. Like all else in Jojo's character design, it follows a higher aesthetic law, perfect from every angle and under every condition of motion or stillness, manifesting in each frame/panel the purest expression of the beauty of that fashion object. It is the platonic ideal of a scarf.
The obvious thing to do when faced with such an object of sartorial beauty and physical impossibility is to try and make it. Succumb to cosplay hubris every time!
I buy uhhhh apparently seven skeins of merino wool yarn in green and yellow and start crocheting; I choose crochet (rather than knitting which could've conceivably been faster and use less yarn) to make the fabric pile nicely on the shoulders. I don't know the official fabric-sommelier terms but it was important that it would settle in thick juicy round folds rather than collapse or look too crisp and angular. It's thinner in some shots/panels but the ends often splay out broadly so I determine it should be quite wide, worn folded in half.
The stripes are, like the rest of the properties of the scarf, varied enough to be up to interpretation. I choose a proportion based on my favorite frames. The colors are also richer in my interpretation than in many of the premade-cosplay versions; color isn't real in Jojo's and I liked these. (And the whole chariot battle in the anime appears to me to be washed out in the dark of night, which makes me interpret the colors as being muted representations of the "true" fabric colors.)
I start crocheting in April 2020, and finish in September. Blocking the scarf makes my whole apartment smell like wet sheep for three days. I wear it whenever possible because it is great.
The next slightly notable barrier to the physical reality of this cosplay is settling on an interpretation of the cuff/glove situation. The gloves are nearly elbow-length which seemingly gestures at something like a boxer's hand wrap but it's not a wrap it's just a fingerless glove? A matinee-length fingerless combat glove with a chic little bracelet. Sure. Or possibly there is a skin-tight wrap and then a second more traditional short glove with a cuff thing. Alright. Except this is supposed to be 1938 so it doesn't seem likely to be a stretch fabric but there are no visible buttons or zipper so I learn about the dates of invention of spandex and neoprene and nylon (1939 New York World's Fair! Relevant! But not commercially available until 1940, I'm sorry Mr. Joestar). I settle on something between the visual literalist approach and the functional interpretation and custom-order some fingerless gloves with a light brown cuff and layer them over a thin stretch-cotton arm wrap type deal.
I don't specifically get my first tattoo, a Joestar birthmark, for the sake of this cosplay in particular but it's also not *not* for the purpose of really going all in on Jojos cosplay.
Everything else in the outfit is pretty straightforward: again we face the stretch-fabric conundrum but we compromise in light of the broader fashion-surrealism of Jojos and wear the skintight croptop. Fortunately denim jeans, simple leather belt (perhaps the last single belt in all of Jojos?) and calf boots are all normal items of clothing that one may readily procure and indeed could have also realistically procured in 1938. Great news for my pedantic soul.
For the first version of the outfit I also included the earlier-in-the-series aviator cap and jacket, which is dispensed with by the time the scarf shows up; a sort of aggregate-Joseph. For later iterations I dispense with these inclusions. In the time between this cosplay's first-round completion and its rework and con debut I got top surgery so the psychological factors involved in wearing a skintight croptop with no layer over it shifted significantly!
I wear the cosplay VERSION ONE on corporate Zoom meetings in my house on Halloween of 2020. I have a great time and also I wear the scarf in regular outfits, very cool. This version does not include wig nor makeup; this is fine because, applying the functional interpretation, he is just a guy and I don't need to do anything to my face to look like some guy.
Several years later I am attending a con with my partner and their other partner and we discuss Jojo's and decide we will be Triple-Joseph: each of the Joseph versions/ages we meet in Parts 2, 3, and 4. The narrative from this point forward is more joyously recounted in the first-person plural.
My hair is no longer its natural Joseph-Joestar-brown and my standards have been raised so I am forced to order and style a wig. Styling wigs induces a state of fear and paralysis in me so I lay this burden at the feet of my partner. They broadly share my visual-functional hybrid philosophy particularly in wig-making, so we determine together that we will prioritize the general spiky-bangs anime-boy shape but aim for a naturalistic hair texture. The styling takes about 5 hours total, and 4.7 of those hours seem to me to be spent in an early stage in which the final shape is not yet being approached. This art remains a mystery to me but I trust the process.
[wig process photos]
Between the agony of wig-styling sessions comes the (relative) ecstasy of makeup testing. We watch some tutorials, look up other cosplayers' approaches, consider what we like and dislike about our forebears' noble efforts at jojofying their faces.
This is a broadly collaborative effort which sees the three of us piling into a tiny bathroom sharing a mirror and two eyeliner pencils to try to replicate trademark Jojo facial contouring lines. The Battle Tendency eyebrows take several drafts to get right.
[makeup process photos]
[the playlist]
Con debut day arrives and we finish our makeup, which takes about two hours. Probably we can get that down to an hour and a half, but there aren't too many efficiencies to be gained beyond the assurance that comes with practice. And anyway this two hours included a lot of yapping, the last-minute creation of Shizuka as a prop for Oldseph and the "clackers" for me (reappropriated fluffy hat-ties cut from the eBay-thrifted Oldseph hat), the packing of the con bag, etc.
[shizuka photo]
We are energized by the joyful reception of our Joseph^3 group; watching someone smile wider and wider as they recognize one of us, then another, then ANOTHER, usually culminating in an exclamation or a laugh, is a pleasure that does not diminish over a long con day. And we connect with many other Jojo's cosplayers, swapping cosplay creation stories, jojo-posing for photos together, sharing anticipation for the just-announced Steel Ball Run animation. (The SBR announcement, serendipitously, followed our decision to cosplay jojos for this con, but preceded the con itself.)
We have a great time jojo-posing on our own, hunting for the best places to take photos and trying to copy the screenshots and memes we love best. I have been on a long journey improving at cosplay photography; I would not have named it among my skills until about a year ago. I started improving when, under the influence of boredom and jojos, I started staging closet cosplay photos and learning by trial and error what poses look like as compared to how they feel: "learning my angles" and some basic principles of composition. This started to come together out in the world / at cons thanks to a lot of input from my partner (who has, among other photographic contributions, a trained eye for a good place to take photos and an instinct for getting the best moments documented) plus a little bit of osmosis from the more photo-skilled in our local cosplay community.
After a year of cons most often spent in the sensory hell of Hellaverse cosplay, the ease of wearing a cosplay that is Just Clothes feels like a revelation. No color-contacts? No genuine-feather tail that I can't sit on? No face-paint base layer? A wig less than 5 lbs? No heels? This is child's play I could wear this forever.
Jojo's means the world to me in terms of unlocking a sense of freedom in gender expression, rekindling whimsy and joy in a weird transitional time for me and for the world. Watching it was, simply, an experience of the sublime. And I had not been in fandom for some years at that point; returning to what felt like an abandoned home state of creative flourishing and (online) social connection.
It was a fascinating experience to revisit the same cosplay across a significant time gap, and to reflect on all the features of my life that changed so entirely in 5 years. My relationship to my body, to my creative endeavors, to my status in fandom, all shifted dramatically, as did my social life, my work, the shape of my free time, where I live. Appropriate, perhaps, to portray one stage of a character who lives a long and varied life!
<= To be continued... ==
