MORE ABOUT KILLUA

While I've always been a huge sucker for shounen anime, it had been quite a while since I'd gotten very attached to one, so when I watched Hunter x Hunter my love for it really hit me like a ton of bricks. Since watching it I have become a fan of all of Yoshihiro Togashi's works as his writing is good fun and his characters just jump off of the page, but Hunter x Hunter remains my favorite work of his for the way it deconstructs typical shounen anime and for the way he wrote the arc of one of my favorite characters of all time, Killua Zoldyck. It's not every day you get to see a character start off a series in such a horrible mental place and truly discover who they are and want to be, and change for the better over the course it. For this reason I think Killua is always going to hold a special place in my heart, so of course I had to cosplay him.

The garments in this costume are simply thrifted and modified. I spent by far the most time on the wig. Killua changes outfits many times throughout Hunter x Hunter — in fact he's known for being kind of a fashion icon—but his face and hair tend to stay the same throughout. So I wanted to make the wig the best and most accurate I could make. Up until this point I had never styled a wig even remotely like this, so it was a huge learning process. Ultimately the process I ended up following was teasing the wig layer by wefted layer, blow drying it to set the teased fibers, brushing it out so the fibers were crimped and easier to style, and then cutting and shaping the spikes with these altered fibers. There were a lot of mishaps along the way and I think given the opportunity I could do a much better job styling a new wig a second time around, but overall I'm quite happy with how it came out!