The Official “Oh S**t, It’s Almost Halloween!” Last-Minute Costume Guide

OMG you guys, Halloween is literally five days away! Do you have your super awesome, cute and totally original costume idea picked out, ironed and ready to go? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Luckily, I have been in similar jams and I have a few last-minute Halloween ideas to share with you. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, mostly because it is an opportunity for me to bust out my wig collection and wear something that is large and cumbersome. Forget “sexy” costumes, it is all about the large cardboard or foam and bewigged costumes for me. It is my personal belief that it is not a proper Halloween costume if it is not taking up the personal space of at least three people around you. So, enough with the babbling, onward to the Halloween costume ideas! Hopefully they will work out for some of you:

Chantal Biya, First Lady Of Cameroon (Hat tip to Rosa Sparks)
Chantal is interntionally infamous for her mile-high hairdos, stuck-in-the-’90s fabulous clothing and the fact she is married to an African dictator.This costume mixes all that is great about Halloween: crazy wigs, wacky clothing you got from a discount store, crazy wigs and some slight clutural reference.
What You’ll Need: One teased Tina Turner-style wig (the cheaper the better) sprayed to that perfect hue of brown-orange. Get thee to your nearest Feline’s Basement and purchase the gaudiest, tackiest pantsuit you can find (bonus points if it is designer, circa 1993 and not of a color normally found in nature). Layer on thick amounts of make-up, including Chantal’s signature over exaggerated eyebrows. Finish the look off with a purse that matches your ensemble and you are good to go! Ignore any references to dying children, poverty or political prisoners as you brag about your designer suit and multi-million dollar jewels.

Slow Food Movement
It’s the most popular food trend of 2009! Plus, this costume is pun-ny, everyone likes puns, right?!
What You’ll Need: If you can find some sort of food costume, great; if you can’t, don’t sweat it. Get some purple balloons and make yourself into grapes. Or, go the easy route and draw a large food item of your choice on cardboard and tape it to yourself. Once you have your food clothing picked out, go to a party and crawl around on the floor a lot and keep making naive, ignorant statements about the eating habits of people living in the inner city. At the end of the night, eat a hot dog and just say “fuck it.”

Molls
Come on, don’t pretend that you don’t want to be her.
What You’ll Need: Kewt black wig with a flip, if you don’t already have a similar hairstyle. Find an American Apparel t-shirt and American Apparel track shorts or some other “vlogger-chic” clothing ensemble. Find a nice, large piece of cardboard and cut a large rectangle down the middle, big enough for you to be seen through the hole. Write “Molls…She Wrote” along the top and include a Tumblr-style “Follow” button in the upper right-hand corner. Get drunk and have fun.

American Apparel Model
Yes, this has been done before, but it still a cute concept, especially if you want to show a bit of skin without being loathed as the girl who wore the “slutty” costume to the party.
What You’ll Need: One American Apparel flesh-colored unitard and one pair of American Apparel knee socks. Coked-out expression and after-the-fact “Dov-Charney-isn’t-that-creepy-but-yeah-I-had-sex-with-him-on-the-factory-floor” personal essay optional.

Dead Magazines
OK, smarty pants, we get it: you are totally “tuned in” to the hip goings on of the media! Your costume would surely be popular at certain cocktail parties in New York! Sadly, you like in Minnesota and none of your friends read magazines. Oh well, this will give you an excuse we wear something big and feign intellectual superiority over your pals.
What You’ll Need: Large print-outs of the covers of Gourmet, Radar, Modern Bride, Domino or some other dead magazine (there is a lot of them to choose from). Strap the over-size print out to yourself and do yourself up in zombie paint (this YouTube girl actually has a pretty quick and inexpensive way to do zombie make-up). Walk around and talk about the death of print media.

Unemployed You
The hottest trend of 2009!
What You’ll Need: Go as yourself but, you know, sadder. Sweat pants required.

Couple’s Costume: Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir Intellectual-y!
What You’ll Need: For the dude: dark suit, clean-shaven face and slicked-back hair. Get a pair of googley-eye glasses and tape one of the eyes so that it stays in place while the other swings around. For the gals: get a white button-up shirt and a black high-waisted skirt with a matching jacket. Get a piece of dark colored fabric and tie it around your hair like a turban (see picture). For both: get about twenty packs of cigarettes and smoke them continually throughout the night.

Okay, so these are just some ideas but I’m sure that some of you out there can come up with even better last minute costume ideas! However, here are a few things to avoid:

• “Slutty” anything: It isn’t the skin-baring that is particularly bad about these costumes, it is just that they are ubiquitous Halloween choices for “that girl.” It was fun to wear revealing costumes when you were in college but seriously, knock it off. You can think up something more clever than a pre-packaged “sexxxy” ladybug costume you bought at Ricky’s.

• Balloon Boy: Everybody is going be some “Balloon Boy” reference. It is this year’s Sarah Palin. Same goes for anything having to do with Facebook, Twitter, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga and Where The Wild Things Are.

• Anything Whip It or Roller Derby Girl-related: This isn’t because the ideas are played out or anything, it is just that skates and drinking do not mix.

halloween costume