‘The most festive, accessible and diverse variety of people’: the photographer’s new book illuminates the subjects below the suits
Thurstan Redding is a double Virgo. Meticulous, efficient and focused, he likes to get things done. That’s why fashion photography is a perfect career choice for him: you obsessively prepare everything, click, work on post, then deliver. He feeds the part of Virgo that needs to see results. And for five years this is how Thurstan has worked.
That doesn’t mean it’s not creative. His planning stage for any shoot, which I’ve seen up close since we’ve been best friends for a decade, consists of countless storyboards, endless references and research, large-scale drawings he draws when an idea comes up, late-night phone calls. calls and inspiration drawn from everywhere. he works with gucci, chanel, Louis Vuitton. He has been photographed for numerous magazines. And yet, after a while working like clockwork with fashion seasons three years ago, Redding decided to give herself a different challenge.
“I guess (I wanted to do) something that didn’t feel ephemeral,” he explains of the moment his Virgo double self embarked on his first large-scale personal project. Three years later, his first book, published by Thames & Hudson, as well as an accompanying 50-image exhibition, has landed in Paris. cosplay kids it’s here.
Redding set her sights on cosplay as she began to think about communities that, until that point, had remained largely uncaptured. “Initially, I was drawn to the amazing images coming out of the cosplay community,” he tells me. He had seen cosplayers on the streets of Los Angeles and, when he returned to London, he kept seeing them at the DLR. He was drawn to such a commitment to dress. “I googled ComicCon of course and booked myself to go to the next one. It was incredible.”
However, Thurstan is always photographing people in costume, so I ask him why this was any different. “I think one thing I noticed among all the cosplayers is that through the act of impersonating someone else, I found out so much more about them as people,” he says. “I photograph so many people dressing up or being dressed up by others. On set I watch people embody characters all the time. Cosplay felt like that process with the dial up. Here there are people who dress up and become someone else. They spend their time, their money, so much mental energy, thousands of hours on these costumes and really embodying these characters that they love, the cosplayers are also being nurtured.”
In fact, the artifice could say one thing: C3PO, a Storm Trooper, The Little Mermaid, but what it reveals, and the part that most appealed to Thurstan, was the subjects beneath the costumes.
“Cosplay talks about why we all dress up. To signify who we are now, to communicate our taste and our history, to become someone with a history” – Thurstan Redding
This is something Thurstan did not expect. In his first shoot, he had imagined amazing visual effects: incredible characters, brought to life by skilled artists, cinematically lit in suburban settings. But the way he felt after taking the first picture (of Bo Peep from toy story) was the moment he realized this could be a book. “I met people along the way who used cosplay to gain confidence, even if they hadn’t told their families,” she says.
Thurstan met people who dressed in certain outfits to remember their past, their parents, for example, with whom they no longer spoke. He shot baby massage therapists, teaching assistants, college professors with fulfilling lives outside of this trade. “Cosplay talks about why we all dress up. To signify who we are now, to communicate our taste and our history, to become someone with a history”.
Many Cosplayers were initially aloof when Thurstan approached them. This is a community, albeit closely tied to capitalist structures like movie studios and computer game empires, that is dedicated to to play cosplay part. “Many people do this not for money, but for love. it’s play. And I really had to remember that when I was filming,” she says. “It took me a long time to gain the trust of so many cosplayers. This is a guarded community that really protects itself.”
Beyond the people involved, Thurstan found the social fabric of cosplay inspiring. “People form communities, which forms a larger community. And while it needs a protective shell to prevent a subculture from becoming a mass culture, within cosplay, when I went to ComicCon, for example, it was the most diverse, accessible, and festive array of people I’ve ever seen. And there was no fanfare about it. Truly, anyone can be a cosplayer. You just have to respect people’s time, effort and passion. Also thanks here to Finlay MacAulay and Anita Bitton at Establishment – they helped me cast so many amazing people.”
And really, while this book is about Cosplayers, and this community that Thurstan was finally welcomed into, it tells me that it’s also an autobiographical project. We all have to dress up. Sometimes we need to escape. Sometimes we need to use what we wear to communicate our most honest wishes to the world. Redding hasn’t seen this better executed than in the cosplay community.
“I felt so brave while filming this project. That’s why I think about what I wear, that’s why I’m careful and considerate and have feelings about the way I dress every day. We all are. And after a long and wonderful time in fashion, it was exciting to be reminded again why we all dress up: to tell a story, to escape to some magical place… to become a hero of the day.”
Cosplay Kids: Thurstan Redding is available to buy from Thames & Hudson here, with a proportion of the proceeds going to the British Red Cross to support the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.