What your offensive Halloween costume says about you
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Version 0 of 1. At the end of this month, it’s Halloween again, when thoughts turn, once again, to the question of costumes. Primarily: how to make innocent concepts sick enough to stand out from the crowd. Time was when sexy witches were all Halloween-haters had to complain about. Now there are costumes embodying a sexy version of the snowman from Frozen. Seriously: finding the erotic side to a snowman? It’s just wrong. If you dislike Halloween, you probably fall into one of two camps: those who are outright put off by the transformation of kids’ cartoon fun into the kind of burlesque you see at clubs behind truck stops and by the off-ramp of the freeway, and those who, obliging the wearer, take umbrage at costumes designed to offend. I have to admit, if they’re clever enough, I have a weakness for the latter – for the tasteless Halloween costumes that take the silliness of the whole exercise as far as it’ll go. Not babies dressed up as strippers in fish-nets and bra-tops, obviously. Nor the item on the Today show this week, featuring a child dressed up as a cigarette. (Actual tag line at the costume’s store: “No worry of cancer with this cigarette costume. Who knew tobacco could look this cute?”) The Phat Pimp Child Costume is horrible and depressing, although more on aesthetic than moral grounds. And Baby Hitlers? Probably not. Depends on the venue. I think we can all agree, at the end of a long, traumatic year, that any costume revolving around Isis is probably a no-no. Some of the news-pegged costumes, however, can be great, like the year loads of guys came as Joe the Plumber, in boiler suits and carrying wrenches, which made the Halloween parties feel porny but not in the usual way (i.e. for once it was the guys carrying the porn-star load). I’m sorry to say I find this a tiny bit brilliant, not least for doing something to upset the dreary virality of the challenge itself and all those horrendously smug videos on Facebook: Well, the ice bucket challenge is now a Halloween costume pic.twitter.com/clCJR4q2qf And, OK – this, too: custom costumes for pregnant women. The nun one strikes me as the perfectly pitched costume, combining sly commentary, occult overtones and cast-iron, head-to-toe covering, a brilliant antidote to the sex-dolls-come-to-life of the average Halloween look. A few years ago, a friend tried to persuade me to go to a Halloween party with him as one half of a pair of boobs, made out of huge latex discs, which he assured me would be fun and which I had quite an un-fun reaction to. Wrongly, probably. Benny Hill-style sex costumes have evolved as a way to send up the hideous earnestness of all those unsmiling sex kittens. Frankly, I’d rather go as a toilet. Although not “dressed up” like a homeless person. Everyone draws the line in a different place. I remember this guy one year: he rented a wheelchair from a medical supply unit, put on an adult-size Superman costume and went as Christopher Reeve. Another year, a friend of a friend fabricated a surprisingly amazing one-man costume of the Twin Towers aflame. You had to admire his bravado, but it was probably too soon. Mostly, it’s not the costumes that offend, but the drunks and the general obnoxious on the street on Halloween; the hulking great teenagers clogging up your doorstep and swiping candy meant for kids 10 years younger. (What do you do, when that happens? Do you ever turn them away? The whole transaction can feel weirdly grabby and sad.) “As a paranoid person,” a friend began to tell me – and then proceeded to recount her fear of being in a bar at Halloween, finding herself unable to judge who the genuine weirdos were. Which reminds me of a great costume joke once made by Chris Morris, designed to offend and overshooting its target, from the Channel 4 Brass Eye special on hysteria surrounding pedophiles. A grainy photo of a large building filled the screen, while the voiceover said, “This clever pedophile has disguised himself as a ... school.” Now there’s a thought provoking Halloween costume. |