@ilia.li.cos: Part 2/? of making a Ming Dynasty Inspired Toph Cosplay: the tieli! My Toph cosplay is primarily inspired by the jinyiwei (embroidered uniform guard, they were like the secret police of the Ming Dynasty) uniforms, since I wanted to reimagine Toph in the Ming Dynasty and replace her chief of police uniform. The base of the outfit is a tieli inspired by cifu, which were pleated ceremonial robes featuring richly embroidered 4-clawed dragon-like creatures that could only be awarded by the emperor. I was originally thinking that I would maybe replace the dragon-like creature with a badger-mole or winged boar, but in the end I decided to go with a flying fish design since they are the most emblematic of the jinyiwei. Cifu decorated with flying fish are called feiyufu. I also decided on a monochromatic design because I didn’t want to deviate too far from Toph’s canon color palette, and I’ve seen some really pretty historical paintings of tieli with only gold designs that I wanted to emulate. In addition to a flying fish across the chest and back, feiyufu were traditionally decorated with designs across the knees (called xilan) and down the sleeves (called tongxiulan). I decided to screenprint these designs to make it easy to cover many yards of fabric with a repeating pattern. When designing my screenprinting pattern, I referenced a variety of Ming Dynasty pottery paintings. I built my design around lotuses as the central motif since Toph’s name contains the character for lotus, and I snuck in the White Lotus symbol too. I also tried to evoke the pattern of the Earth Kingdom symbol in my design, without overtly including it. Also omg it was so stressful to freehand the flying fish, the fabric was too dark to lightbox so I just sent it… #hanfu #atlacosplay #atla #tophbeifong #handmadecosplay

Ilia Li

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Wednesday 10 June 2026 16:01:01 GMT