About me
Marie-Claude Bourbonnais is a French Canadian costumer, cosplayer and glamour model. People associate her trademark oversized breast augmentation with her modeling career, but MC actually received her first surgery when she was 23, years before she started as a model. As a teenager, she was fascinated by the extreme body shapes of both American comic book and Japanese anime characters. Her interest in costumes and clothing production led her to complete studies in Fashion Design. For many years, MC worked in every area of garment and costume production, doing everything from pattern making to sewing, as well as producing dance costumes, swimsuits and custom prom dresses.
But her name was first brought to the public eye in November 2007, when she entered a contest to be part of a calendar produced by aradio station in Quebec City. One of the radio hosts, Marto Napoli, choose MC for the 2008 Dream Team Calendar. Marto Napoli was well known and extremely popular in Quebec City and surrounding areas for his humorous radio show. He had also been hosting a rock music/jackass type of show in various nightclubs through the province of Quebec for years. He introduced MC as a character in both his radio show and nightclub events and MC quickly became well known in the Quebec City radio world. Marto Napoli’s audience became MC’s first fan base.
In the years that followed, MC started traveling through North America and collaborated with various glamour photographers. Her edgy look and charming demeanor quickly earned her a modeling job for amajor advertisem*nt campaign and she was published in many men’s magazines. But even though MC was now known as a model, her first passion was still costume making and she decided to include in her modeling work a costume she had custom made for herself. The costume was Frost, from Mortal Kombat, and was a tribute to the videogame she had been a fan of as a teenager. Published in February 2009, the Frost photoshoot was wildly popular in a way that neither MC nor the photographer had expected. This is how MC found out about cosplay, conventions, and the whole costuming phenomenon that was nearly unknown in the province of Quebec at that time.
In 2010, MC attended her first comiccon and convention, wearing costumes she had made by herself. Through her modeling work, she had met the people from Polymorphe, a Montreal based latex clothing company who had sponsored her during the previous years. MC had an idea to develop, with Polymorphe, a cosplay costume using latex, material which was still pretty underground at the time and that was mainly worn and used through the fetishist community. They made a latex version of Sue Storm from the Fantastic 4 that MC wore for NYCC 2010. The costume was a huge hit and pictures of MC as Sue Storm soon could be found all over the Internet, making MC one of the most popular North American cosplayers at the time. That latex costume created a precedent in both the cosplay and the fetish scenes. From that moment, various companies started to produce latex superhero costumes for cosplayers. Because of MC’s influence, some fetish models, who were strangers to the cosplay world until then, started to include various characters’ costumes made out of latex in their modeling work.
In parallel, MC also got hired as an actress in Heroes of the North, a live action webseries about Canadian superheroes in which she played the role of Hornet. The Heroes of the North brand developed its own comic books and figures, so MC’s character appeared in comics and was produced as toys. Some of MC’s costuming work will be seen in Heroes of the North – Season 2 as Christian Viel, the producer, commissioned her to design and produce seven complex leather outfits. Plus, MC’s character Hornet was alsoproduced as a 1:6 scale figure throughFlirty Girl Collectibles’ Heroes of the North toys line.
This is also at that time that MC started working with the American board games company Ninja Division – Soda Pop Miniatures. She first made the costume of one of their characters, Candy. In the next few years, Soda Pop Miniatures integrated MC as a character in their games Tentacle Bento, Relic Knights, Super Dungeon Explore and Karate Fight, producing drawings and miniatures based on her image and figure. Later, MC also started to collaborate with the Italian designer Paolo Parente who hired her to personify Koshka, one of the main characters in his board game Dust Tactics. Parente will, from now on, draw the character based on MC’s figure and face. In 2016, Ninja Division in collaboration with the manga publisher Seven Seas Entertainment hired MC to build a Monster Musume Rachnera cosplay that would be presented at Anime Expo. The work in progress pics of MC building Rachnera in her workshop received a lot of attentionand the project became viral online. During Anime Expo 2016, MC even got to meet Okayado, the creator and manga artist of Monster Musume, who had also been followingRachnera’s making of process.
MC is now known as a “technical cosplayer” who builds high quality costumes, props, and sets for photoshoots. She owns a workshop fully equipped for clothing and costume making, including a large variety of sewing machines, and leatherwork tools and equipment. Her workshop is also equipped for prop making, including sculpting, molding, fiberglass, woodworking equipment and tools, etc. In addition the workshop houses a photo studio. Furthermore, her self-taught leatherwork granted her a formal college degree.
Because of Marie-Claude Bourbonnais’ fame, talent, and beauty, she is now sought out as a guest by comiccon and convention organizers across North America, Mexico, South America and Europe.
