Cosplaying as Auron and Braska in 2023 (posted 2025-04-22)

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This post has been a long time in the making, as the date suggests, but I did want to keep a record of how we did it. This was our first time cosplaying and I made both costumes over a period of about six months, but ran out of time for some aspects of them and there were a few things that I would have changed if I were to do it again. I sewed everything by hand (messily) and prioritised comfort over looks, so that meant making things out of real clothes as much as possible rather than substantial use of cardboard/plastic/etc. In total we spent about £500; a full list of what we bought and where is below.

@adt’s eyes are brown and mine are blue, so cosplaying as my guys was inevitable at some point, imo. My ideal state of affairs would have been to cosplay as young Auron and Braska, but that would have meant @adt would have had to shave off his beard, and he was already being very indulgent by agreeing to cosplay as Auron in the first place.

The most sensible way to describe this is probably to go through each costume in terms of its major components.

Hair

@adt has naturally dark hair, so we didn’t have to worry about dying it. I bought the shortest clip-on ponytail I could find on eBay; it was a bit thicker than old!Auron’s real one and I probably should have tried thinning it out a bit, but I was worried that I’d destroy it so I didn’t touch it, haha. Unfortunately @adt had his hair cut about a week before the con and it was much more difficult to clip the ponytail on as a result; I think it fell off quite early on and we ended up forgoing it after a while. It also wasn’t quite dark enough, but I thought the colour of the blackest one would be too unnatural.

On the morning of the con, I attempted to put some grey streaks into @adt’s hair using Kryolan Temple White and to make it a bit spikier using VO5 gel; neither had much effect and in the photos it just looks like his hair is greasy, haha. I think we should have used quite a bit more of both; iirc we were worrying about getting to the con in time, so the moral of the story is, as often, Get Up Earlier. Overall, Auron’s hair was one of the least successful components of the cosplay, but at least it was generally the right colour!

Glasses

We’d got into the habit of looking everywhere for Auron-style glasses, and eventually found some on Amazon that were a reasonable colour and shape, with mirrored lenses. They don’t have the crossbar we see on Auron’s actual glasses, but who knows whether there are any real glasses out there that look like that. @adt is very short-sighted and spent the whole day unable to see very much … I appreciate his sacrifice.

Collar

This was one of the weak points of the cosplay; I was thinking about how to do it well and if I’d had more time I would perhaps have been able to stiffen it somehow and sew some leather strapping onto it. As things were I just bought an appropriately coloured snood from the local Spar and @adt wore that. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite fill all the space between his chin and the top of his vest, so there was a very un-Auron-like patch of chest on display.

Cuirass

We bought a black vest in Primark and I sewed a pattern into it in gold thread. I didn’t manage to get much of it done in time, but a lot of it was obscured by the belt and robe anyway.

Robe

I bought a robe on eBay for the suspiciously low prize of under 30 quid. It’s a nice dark red; somewhere I think a lot of Auron cosplays fall down is that the robe often seems too bright, so even if this was highly amateurish in most respects, at least we avoided having a particularly garish Auron. Looking at the pictures now it’s very slightly too short, but not unreasonable.

Auron’s robe is meant to have a slit in the back, but I decided against this because it would probably have required sewing a hem in to stop it fraying, and I didn’t really have time. There was a cord sewn into the robe in the same colour; I cut this into smaller lengths and sewed some of it onto the left sleeve to act as loops to hold leather strapping. I had originally intended to put miniature belt buckles onto the end of the strapping, but I think this turned out trickier than anticipated, so the strapping ended up bare. There was meant to be more of it attached to the front of the robe, but this would also have been difficult to navigate, and I used the rest of the strapping on Auron’s boots anyway.

Using white thread, I sewed a blue ribbon around the neck/collar area. Because of time constraints and the shape of the robe, I didn’t add this below the belt area, which is a small inaccuracy.

For the pauldron, I sewed yellow felt onto a piece of fake leather, and then sewed that into the collar of the robe on the left shoulder. During a visit to Birmingham (also for final fantasy reasons lol) I happened to find a really good tassel, and painted some wooden beads (using the “put them in a plastic bag with the paint” technique), threaded it through them, and attached it to the pauldron. I think this was one of the best looking parts of the cosplay, but annoyingly, the weight of the pauldron dragged it backwards so it’s barely visible in any of the photos.

I bought a plastic jug and papier-mâchéd it, then painted it a kind of beige colour, and attached a leather cord to the lid. On the day we used the jug to store some emergency sewing supplies, but it was pretty hard to get things out of without tipping the whole thing up, so it was a nice thought but not really workable.

For the beads that Auron wears next to his jug, I used some more of the painted wooden beads I’d prepared, and threaded them onto a wire so the whole thing could retain a rigid shape. These ended up attached to the belt (see below).

Gauntlet

We found some rubbery gardening gloves and I sewed on some cardboard that I had spraypainted black to the wrist part of the right one (usefully made of a more sewable fabric); the extra thread was used to tie the gauntlet around the wrist. I also made a couple of holes at the other end and put some thinner thread through them to tie around @adt’s arm so the gauntlet had a better chance of staying in place.

The cardboard itself consisted of three pieces that had been bent and glued together, in a rough approximation of an arm shape. If I had had more time/paint/sense, I would have done some more coats of paint on it; its blackness wasn’t entirely convincing.

Belt

We bought two belts in Primark and I then sewed these onto a strip of blue fabric, using a larger strip of white fabric to wrap around the belts from both sides and hold them in place. A wider strip of green fabric went between these and the robe. This was something I wanted to do more work on: I had ideas about sewing patterns into the blue fabric using darker blue thread, adding press studs in places, even incorporating a fake snakeskin fabric that I nearly bought for some reason … but unfortunately there wasn’t time for this.

Trousers

We bought a pair of unmarked trackie bottoms from Primark; I was looking for some with the two stripes down the sides but they all seemed to have either three, one, or none?? I sewed a white ribbon down the front of each leg, and then sewed the stripes into the sides just using thick thread, which was really just a huge waste of time. Sewing over the pockets was tricky, but I managed to do it in a way that still left them usable.

Boots

I found some chunky, fabricy boots on eBay and spraypainted the toe area silver; I’d been planning to attach some cardboard to the front instead, but there was no easy way of doing this. I sewed some leather strapping onto each boot in an X shape, and cut circles out of cardboard, spraypainted them gold, and used string to attach them to the front at the top. These seemed pretty stable when we tested them, but fell off within about an hour of the con starting. It would probably have made more sense to sellotape safety pins onto the back of the circles and then just pin them onto the boots, seeing as the top of the boots was soft fabric.

Headdress

In terms of ingenuity, this was my greatest achievement of the cosplay, tbh. I attached a thin black headband to a grey sweatband and pinned a badge wrapped in blue cellophane to the front of it (thank you Vincent Valentine badge that I bought at another con for your service). I sewed some dark blue fabric to the inside of each side of the sweatband and tied both pieces about halfway down with a ribbon.

For the various other protruding pieces, I spraypainted some cardboard (for the side bits) and some foam (for the long tail part). I think it was a particular type of cosplay foam that you can heat up to stiffen it, but keeping it flexible made sense, especially because we flew to the con and I needed to roll it up in the suitcase. I painted on the black and white patterns on the back of the headdress tail. In DFFOO I think there were actual Yevon alphabet symbols on it, but in the original it seems to have just been circles, so I went with those.

I found a dark blue headscarf and put the grey sweatband on over that, then tucked the pieces of cardboard and foam into it. The tail blew out of it at one point while we were outside – it was quite windy – but everything stayed in place apart from that. With the pieces tucked in the headband was quite tight against my head and it was a bit sore by the end of the day, but that didn’t last long!

Robe

Braska’s robe was made of three pieces: the chest part, the sleeves, and the skirt part. All of these involved sewing on the “petals” in three different colours of red fabric. I tried to base this on his model but I think in some cases alterations had to be made when some of the material underneath was exposed. There are still some gaps visible in some of the photos; the join at the shoulders is especially problematic.

I bought a long-sleeved T-shirt and then cut it into two pieces; one of them formed the basis of the sleeves part. The main top part of the robe was based on a yellow hoodie with the sleeves removed. Braska’s robe has a sort of collar around the neck but I couldn’t quite work out what it was or how to attach it, so the hood of the hoodie worked as my approximation of this. I took the cord out of the hoodie and replaced it with a black ribbon, tied in a bow. I then cut the rest of the T-shirt into a breastplate-esque shape and put it over the top of the hoodie, sewed it into place, and drew on the pattern using fabric paints and fabric markers. This also went over the top of the skirt, which was just a thin almost-floor-length skirt with more petals sewn into it.

The biggest mistake of the whole cosplay, I think, was that I used a fairly tight T-shirt for this. Sewing the petals into it made it even tighter and it was a struggle to get the sleeve part on properly; I think it ended up not sitting on my shoulders correctly. As with the skirt, I should have used something much looser.

The petals are supposed to have a white hem; this is yet another thing I’d have added if I’d had more time. The robe mostly covered my feet although they’re visible in some of the pictures; I wore sandals anyway, which seems fitting for Braska, big hippie that he is.

Bracelets

I bought these at our local alternative/new age/goth shop. We see one bracelet in the official art of Braska, but inspecting his model reveals that he wears an identical one on his left wrist as well. I have no idea where these bracelets are now, which is a shame because I would genuinely consider wearing them day to day.

By our local con’s standards, our cosplay probably would have seemed quite impressive, but this was a UK-wide con and there were people there who clearly cosplayed as a major hobby. We went to the previous iteration as well so I was fully prepared for this; we did look pretty amateurish, but so did others, and I think the novelty value of cosplaying as Braska made up for that, judging by the number of people who came up to me and enthused about how they hadn’t seen a Braska cosplay before.

We didn’t make any effort at making Auron’s sword or Braska’s staff, partly because we were flying to the con, but a guy randomly approached us at the beginning of the day telling us he had Auron’s sword and we could borrow it, so @adt was very happy to carry that around all day.

There was one other Auron at the con whose cosplay looked much more professional; he was also a lot closer to Auron's actual height, but I like small cute Auron, is that so wrong. There was also a very friendly northern Jecht who also seemed extremely tall … the dangers of going to England, I guess.