8 Anime With the Worst Dressed Characters

Character design in any anime series is important. Creators have certain liberties they can take with characters in order to differentiate them from series in the same genre. However, if you make a character too “out there” with their choice of clothes, it can put people off. If you create a school life series, you can’t have people in a feather boa and a thong, unless that series is Kill la Kill and fashion plays a huge part in the plot.

In terms of series with the worst fashion, the villains in the series tend to suffer the most, but any character can have some bad fashion choices ranging from impractical to ridiculous. So let’s be bitchy queens and see the series that present characters in their worst state of dress.

Worst Dressed Anime Characters

Sailor Moon

Much of what you see advertised for Sailor Moon is the girls looking pretty good in their swell sailor school uniform battle suits. However, when you actually watch the show and see these characters in their not-battle clothes, you see the finest faux pas of 90’s fashion. Even the characters they try to make elegant look pretty bad. It’s not just the girls either, that poor, poor tuxedo mask gets a fine shaft when it comes to clothing.

Cardcaptor Sakura

Magical girl style, at least classic magical girl style, bothers me to no end. The trope is that these girls are supposed to be cute and their costume should be all pink and fluffy. Cardcaptor Sakura is not the first magical girl series to take that a bit overboard, but it is by far the most obvious. Even the men’s clothes border on ridiculous. Can we not change the magical girl trope to skin-tight leather and spiked shoulder pads? No, you’re right, that would be ridiculous too.

Bleach

This series conflicts me deeply. If there is one thing that Bleach has always had going for it, it was that the author knew how to create a damn unique character in design. That’s what made things like the Soul Society arc so interesting. However, as things went on… It got a bit weird. I’d say the Hueco Mundo arc is where things went from “unique” to the place beyond you shouldn’t go. Mostly it was the villains who suffered from impractical and oft-strange clothing, but even the allies they met and made were a touch out there.

Black Cat

Black Cat is filled with characters that look like they buy their clothes from a costume shop for Halloween. The worst offender is the protagonist, Train. I mean, jackets that only extend to your ribs are never a good idea unless you have the hips to balance it out. Furthermore, that obnoxious blue color and the neck collar just ruin everything that could have been good. I attribute Train’s fashion sense as the reason this show is so lesser known as a shounen series. It is a clear case of a creator trying to make a unique looking main character, but not succeeding.

Amnesia

I can fully appreciate that the creator of Amnesia went into the series with a clear design plan for the men. They wanted their clothes to compliment their hair in color palette. I think that’s pretty cool, but the design of the clothes themselves takes occasionally weird hip Japanese fashion to an extreme that probably could have been avoided. Too many accessories, too many lines. I don’t think they should have slimmed it down to a t-shirt and some pants, but they probably should have pruned it down somewhat. I can’t imagine the poor animators that tried to incorporate those details into the anime. Or rather, I can because many of those details didn’t make it into many scenes.

Masamune-kun’s Revenge

I don’t often think too much on school uniforms in anime, and that is, with all honesty, how I like it. Japanese school children wear uniforms, but you shouldn’t spend scenes examining them like “what am I even looking at?”

That’s what happened in Masamune-kun’s Revenge, at least for the girl uniforms. So let me get this straight, someone thought pink, possibly frilled shirt, yellow paid skirt, dark blue (possibly actually black) jacket, and light blue striped ribbon was the perfect combination of colors to force females to wear every day?

Please. That uniform is a crime. A hate crime against the female characters in that series.

Yugioh

Pick a Yugioh series, any Yugioh series and you will find obnoxious fashion in many of the characters. Admittedly I have only actually watched the first series, but the fashion of the main characters from what I have seen gets…worse with each new entry. I get it, they are edgy card players and the stranger you dress the better the card player you are. You can’t be a Joey or a Tristan that wears normal cloths and be great at card games. You have to be a Pegasus with his super terrible red suit. A Kaiba in his edgy white duster. A Duke Devilin and his “sexy hipster” swag.

One Piece

Being a pirate has always been representative of freedom. In One Piece, part of that freedom is to obviously wear whatever the hell you want or can skim out of the ocean. Like other series, the villains of One Piece almost exclusively suffer from bad fashion, as if it were on purpose to make them look ridiculous. Compared to Luffy’s crew and their practical, or downright dapper, choices in clothing, the villains often wear just insane outfits, Doflamingo being the most easily notable example, but far from the only.

So, tell us, what are your picks for overall bad anime fashion? We picked series, but perhaps there is a character in particular from any series that irks you? Let us know in the comments section below.