Reverse Bunny Suit

About

Reverse Bunny Suits, known as "Reverse Bunny" (Japanese: 逆バニー, Gyaku Banī) in Japan, are a type of costume that is like a body suit but shows the wearer's bare skin in the area that an ordinary bunny suit covers. Around early 2020, this sexy outfit became a popular subgenre in online illustrations for bunny suits and one of the most popular costumes in the hentai subcultures, with the help of Bunny Day, an unofficial holiday that established its concept on the internet in the late 2010s. Later, this fictional outfit materialized in real life and became popular in cosplays and the porn industry.

Origin

According to Pixiv Encyclopedia^[1] and Nico Nico Pedia^[2], similar "reverse outfit" ideas, which could be called "Reverse Bikini Armours" (逆ビキニアーマー)^[3] or "Reverse School Swimsuits" (逆スクール水着)^[4], could be found in hentai mangas after the 1980s and online illustrations after the 2000s. The online glossaries also point out that a 1997 hentai comic, "Bizarre Daimajutsu" (BIZARRE大魔術) by Mitsunari Tenpuu (天風光成), is the earliest instance of the reverse bunny suit.

Meanwhile, a handful of artists had already posted the reverse bunny suits illustrations to Twitter and Pixiv by the middle of 2019. The oldest one on Pixiv was published by Onakaitai on August 14th, 2014.^[5] On Twitter, Japanese mangaka Shake-O (鮭夫)^[6] has posted rabbit girls wearing reverse bunny suits since 2016 (shown below). Also, illustrator and anime background art designer NYAGORO posted Ryuka Shimizudani from the Japanese manga Saki^[7] in a reverse bunny suit in 2018. His tweet with the illustration, drawn in the drawing chat on Futaba Channel (2chan), suggested 2chan users hadn't been familiar with the idea of this outfit in that period.^[8]

The online presence of reverse bunny suits began increasing around early 2020. At that time, people noticed some online artists posting the illustrations around on November 28th (11/28), December 8th (12/8), January 28th (1/28), February 8th (2/8), and March 28th (3/28) (shown below). Their works got inspired by "Reverse Bunny Day," the unofficial holiday for the outfit which read the numbers of "Bunny Day" (8/2, 8/21, or 8/23) backward or referred to November 28th as "Good Reverse Bunny Day" in a similar way to "Good Knee-High Socks Day".

Early works posted around Reverse Bunny days till February 2020

Spread

Throughout those unofficial anniversary days between the end of 2019 and early 2020, Reverse Bunny Suits gained high visibility on Twitter around the spring of 2020. That year's 3rd celebration on March 28th received much more reaction from Twitter users than in previous years. As its popularity grew on the social networking service, illustrators voluntarily began using censorship to hide nipples and crotch in the illustrations in a concern for community guideline violations or a shadowban^[9] from the SNS. This slightly changed version came to the de-facto standard of the costume on Twitter^[10], Nico Nico Seiga^[11], and other online services that don't allow hentai artworks. On October 31st, 2020, the Japanese TV anime for the light novel How Not to Summon a Demon Lord^[12] celebrated Halloween on Twitter with an illustration by Takahiro Tsurusaki (鶴崎貴大)^[13], the illustrator for the light novel series, in which the anime's heroines are wearing reverse bunny suits in this format.^[14] Pixiv had nearly 5,000 illustrations for this fetish costume only that year, and its amount had increased to about 10,000 by December 2022^[15], in which almost 75% of the submissions were R-18.

Cosplay costume makers started releasing reverse bunny suits in the latter half of 2020. Porn video makers soon introduced the costume into their works and have made it one of the most popular costumes in the Japanese porn industry since the following year. According to the Japanese e-commerce site for adult content, Fanza, the number of porn videos featuring the costume was four in 2020, then increased to 37 in 2021 and nearly 150 in 2022.^[16] It also became popular in the non-porn content by sexy models and cosplayers, which usually combined the outfit with swimsuits or lingerie. Japanese model Aoi Hinata (日向葵衣)^[17], who in a reverse bunny suit made an appearance in a weekly magazine released in December 2021, proclaimed herself the first gravure idol wearing the costume in commercial media by citing a publisher's testimony.^[18]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References