We were lucky to catch up with Sayakat Cosplay recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sayakat, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you wish you had started sooner?

I actually don’t wish I had started earlier. As a cosplayer, there’s a lot of social interactions and nuances that being older helped facilitate. I have a weird entry into being a full time cosplayer, I started after I completed my PhD in biology (my thesis was actually in biophysics/biochemistry but that’s a whole different can of worms to talk about). I had also discovered that I liked teaching and instructing in grad school and that lead me into my current niche within the cosplay community, which is the educational space. I don’t think I would have gravitated to that part of the community without the experience I had and the age at which I started cosplaying. I met and became friends with the community I have now because I was older and had more social experience. If I had started younger there’s a good chance that I would have eventually left because I wasn’t as confident of a person when I was younger and the community and hobby can be intimidating. Being a grad student and learning the skills that I did gave me the ability to experiment and fail and keep learning within this hobby and career.

Sayakat, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’ve been making costumes since I was quite young. My mom taught me how to sew around 8/9 years old and I started to make my own halloween costumes, and that never stopped. In high school I was making bigger and more elaborate costumes every halloween and in college I would plan out my costume build over the summer and make it while home and had access to a sewing machine. My parents actually gifted me a sewing machine when I graduated from college; they obviously knew me pretty well. I kept making bigger and more complicated halloween costumes in grad school; although I was very time and budget limited, which is why it stayed as only halloween costumes for so long. When people ask me how long I’ve been cosplaying for, there’s always 2 answers; one is from when I started to regularly go to cons (which is 10 years at this point) and the other is from when I started making my own halloween costumes, which is basically my whole life.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

They are awful. Digital art is great, but NFTs and AI art are terrible and destroying art in the traditional sense.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

Pay what the art is worth. Especially with cosplay, people in modern times are used to easily accessible and cheap clothing. They assume the same for costumes, and with mass produced cosplays that is true to some extent. But from a historical perspective, for the vast majority of human history clothing was incredibly expensive and took a long time to make. Custom costumes (and any custom art) takes time, skill, and talent to produce. We should not devalue costumes because they are like clothes; they are wearable pieces of art and should be valued as such.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sayakatcosplay
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sayakatcosplay
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/sayakat
• Other: I’m sayakatcosplay on threads, bluesky, and tiktok as well.

Image Credits

kevinertia