By Alex Hamlyn
Arts & Life Editor
Everyone likes a chance to dress up and pretend to be someone else. Not all of us are professional theatre actors or Star Trek convention attendees, though. This means Halloween is the one chance a year you get to wear puffy shirts and elf shoes and not be accused of being a D&D fanatic.
However, that doesn’t mean anything goes. In the spirit of the spooky season, I thought I’d define a few obviously overused and poorly executed costume ideas that should never see the moonlight again.
The revealing, slightly dirty-looking “sexy” costume — good examples of this are: the sexy nurse outfit, Adam and/or Eve, the Playboy Bunny and Borat on the beach. This goes for both the males and females of the trick-or-treating community. I’m not interested in seeing anyone’s junk. An arbitrary date doesn’t excuse you from the decency you destroyed with obscene displays of skin, skin-tight/spray on clothes or glitter.
The obscure, video game or movie related uber-nerd costume — good examples of this are: characters from any of the Final Fantasy games and comic book characters that don’t end their name in -man. Any costume that takes more than two sentences to explain better be the best damn costume ever. No one cares how much your collectors edition, life-sized sword cost, you just look like an obnoxious a-hole.
The trying-way-too-hard-not-to-care costume — examples are: wearing a “hello, my name is: God” sticker, wearing a tuxedo t-shirt and wearing your friend’s signature shirt and saying you are them. This is pretty self-explanatory. If you don’t feel like dressing up that’s fine, just don’t dress up. Doing something half-assed and calling it clever is the hallmark of a pretentious douche bag.
The “kittens and rainbows aren’t nearly as cute as I am” costume — examples of which are: princesses, fairies and couple costumes. Everyone dreams of being a princess one day. I can’t even count the number of times I dreamed of my knight in shining armor coming to rescue me. But we all need to grow up eventually and realize that no knight is coming. Nothing is more pathetic than a 20-year-old girl with her head in a toilet, tiara sticky with alcohol and her sparkling, frilly dress splattered with puke. Hal and Joanne from Body Break costumes are still acceptable.
The stereotypical style of a decade costume — good examples are: people who are dressed like they’re from the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and, most recently added offenders, ’90s. This costume combines the offences of most of the other costumes on the list into an unholy, Voltron-like mega-lame costume idea. It’s unoriginal, it’s lazy and it’s cheap. “Hey, look at me. I’m wearing a headband I found at Value Village and I’m wearing leg-warmers and my dad’s old ski jacket. I’m so ’80s!” Congratulations on dressing ugly on purpose, would you like a prize? Maybe next year you should stay home to give out the candy to the kids who have better costumes than you.
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