Cosplay has exploded onto the scene since the 90s, when it really transformed from a hobby into more of a pop culture phenomena. Short for costume play, it is when you dress up wearing a costume. Essentially, purchasing a Halloween costume of your favorite super hero is a form of cosplay, but it is so much more than it.
Common Cosplay Characters
Now, cosplay is really about you expressing yourself as your favorite character. It can basically be anything from any form of entertainment. Perhaps you have a favorite comic book character or a favor cartoon character. You can costume play this individual. There really is no right or wrong character, although the most popular ones tend to come from live-action movies, cartoons, comic books, anime and manga forms of animation and video games.
As stated earlier, dressing up as Superman for Halloween is a form of cosplay, but dressing up as a character out of season, either for a party or an event, is a bit different. Fans of certain movies would often wear some bits of a costume when seeing a movie, such as the follow up of Star Wars in 1980 and 1983. The basis of a costume play though started in the early 90s in Japan. The term itself was coined by Nobuyuki Takahashi in 1984 when he attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Los Angeles and was impressed by some fans who dressed up like characters from the Japanese magazine My Anime.
In the last decade or two, Cosplay has risen from just a small group of extreme fans to all sorts of people looking to dress up like their favorite characters.