I made this costume as a dare. I was hanging out at a con and one of my friends saw a girl in a fur bikini and said something like, "That must be hard!"
I told her, "It's really very easy. You just have to tack fur onto a bikini." And so then she dared me to make a fur bikini and wear it.
Supposedly this bikini was made for Further Confusion 2004, a furry convention that I went to because I had a friend going and I was curious. It was insanely popular. I won a hall cosplay award as well as got, "I'm gay, and you're hot" said to me. Now that's impressive. I never intended to wear the costume during the day, though...
That was until I ran out of comfortable costumes at a Fanime and figured, what the heck, I'd wear the bikini. The costume was insanely popular. Men, of course, loved it. But women loved it too. Small children played with the tail as their parents smiled happily. What on earth? Armitage gets scorn, but when I wear like 1/10th the cloth of Armitage, suddenly I'm little miss sunshine rather than the succubus? I don't get it.
Regardless, the costume has become one of my "signature" costumes, along with Faye Valentine (what is it with me that the easy costumes are my "signature" costumes? Huh?). And it's a lot of fun to wear, as everyone loves it and it's comfortable...a perfect combination!
The pictures were fun to take, too. Melissa took all of them in her courtyard where we tried to destroy the bounds of good taste. Over the fence, one of her neighbors was busily cleaning up his patio and kept glancing over with this look of "Only in Davis". Yeah, well, that's why you live in a college town, right?
