Van Fanel from The Vision of Escaflowne

Made In. October 2004
Debuted. Akibiyori 2004
Info. I am grudgingly making this page, despite the fact that hardly any documentation of this costume exists which I am thankful for because I believe that in order to get better at something, we should always be reminded of where we we started. The story behind this costume is this: at my first Anime Expo in 2004, I saw a cosplayer with huge and extraordiary feathered wings, and when I got home I wanted to try my hand at wing-making. I made a tiny set of feathered wings, and I wanted to use them for something, but I couldn't think of any costume I could use them for. I started searching the internet for winged characters, and Van Fanel came up in my search. At the time I hadn't seen Escaflowne, but G-Mal looked enough like Van and the costume looked simple enough, so I thought, "Why not?"

My biggest challenge was convincing G-Mal to cosplay as Van! When I first started cosplaying, G-Mal had sworn off cosplaying and claimed that he would never do it. I didn't pester him too much about it, but I did poke him every now and then to see if he might have had a change of heart. He was dubious at first to cosplay as Van, but he finally gave in (what a sweetheart!) to shut me up make me happy. This costume was never really completed; we rushed to finish it in time for Akibiyori, but by the time Akibiyori was over we had kind of lost interest in the costume (probably because we still hadn't seen the series). I will say, though, that G-Mal always did look good in a tight pair of pants! XD