Professional Cosplayers dress up in costumes all the time and sell photos of themselves and such, so I'd imagine you probably are safe, as long as you aren't creating exact likenesses of specific Sailor Moon characters, or doing frame by frame recreations of SM episodes or similar such. Even then, it'd depend on how exact the likeness is. We have several 'near' likenesses being sold in the Daz and Renderosity stores of specific people and in a couple of cases characters. As long as you aren't calling them by the same names, that seems to help too.
See this outfit:
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Most of us KNOW who this outfit is a homage too, at least the male version, but since they didn't call it 'Captain America', and since it's not an exact copy of Chris Evan's outfit, yeah Daz felt they were on safe ground in allowing that product to be sold in their store. Same for the Spidey outfit homage.
As for characters, this one was originally offered under a different name, but was pulled from the Renderosity store and re-released under a different name, and they may have 'smudged' a few vertexes or something just to be on the safe side:
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Just be careful of using carbon copies of logos and such. Trademarks are a completely different animal. Ideas can't be copyrighted/trademarked in most cases, but logos, say the Coca Cola logo, can be...
Then there's 'fair use', see the Star Trek/Dr. Suess Mashup case for an example where the fair use argument eventually prevailed, but of course that one did go to court, which can be a major inconvenience.
'Transformative work' was a key argument in that fair use case BTW.
In that instance, the 'parody' author was specifically parodying a specific Dr. Suess book, not quite frame by frame, but essentially 're-imagined' specific images in a 'Star Trek' setting. The new images were 'hand drawn' by another artist of course, but comparing the two images side by side you could see the points of similarity in the backgrounds and such. They weren't the same image by any means, but had a lot of similarities. And it was DSE that raised the challenge, Paramount didn't get involved in that case as the 'similar' characters looked more like Dr. Suess characters than ST Characters, even though we know who was being 'homaged' in the character's cases.
On 'our side' of the fence, there's the
Agent of Heels-Misadventures of Agent Romanov game. We all KNOW who is being 'homaged' in this game, but the game developer has been very careful with not saying 'Marvel' and 'Black Widow' and such. At least not the last time I checked this game, I haven't downloaded the more recent updates.
So it's a judgement call, particularly if you start making significant monies off of someone else's IP. It's better to just do your own thing of course, but fair use is a thing.
