Just a couple months after The Empire Strikes Back came out in theatres, the sci fi cosplay fanatics got together for West Coast Science Fantasy Conference in Los Angeles in July 1980, aka Westercon. Understandably, there’s a lot of Star Wars cosplay happening here, but I can’t blame them. As a sci fi fan myself, I can only dream about how life-changing those movies would have felt at the time that they came out! As an infant, I was unable to see them in theatres. But I also love that a lot of the cosplay at the time was based on books, drawn from the literary descriptions of characters with a healthy dose of imaginative interpretation from the cosplayers themselves. Considering the size and social acceptability of cosplay conventions in our current age, in 1980 conventions like Westercon were probably much more intimate and niche than they are today.
