Guidelines to follow to ensure you’re serving the best Halloween costume without fear of cancellation.
With the Halloween season upon us, the stress of finding the perfect costume consumes our time and energy. Whether it’s a ghost or a witch, Halloween offers people the perfect opportunity to live out their fantasy and dive into another world.
The challenge of finding the right costume can be overwhelming. You have to dress up as something that’s easy to figure out but also different from others, all the while being creative. Though these factors are important, you also need to ask yourself, will my costume potentially offend anyone?
Understanding What Can Make a Costume Problematic …
While Halloween is an open space to dress up however you want, you have to ensure that it’s still respectable. Some people lose sight of this and venture into appropriating rather than appreciating.
According to Britannica, cultural appropriation is an adoption of certain language, behavior, clothing or tradition belonging to a minority culture or social group by a dominant culture or group in a way that is exploitative, disrespectful or stereotypical.
During the spooky season, we see this a lot with different attire that take traditional elements of a culture and turn it into a costume for entertainment purposes, like Harry Styles wearing a Native American headdress for “fun.” While the line between appreciating and appropriating someone’s culture can become blurred, it’s important to analyze whether your costume has the potential of pushing the wrong boundaries.
To maximize the most amount of fun this Halloween season here’s a list of costume DON’Ts you need to consider:
1. DON’T use someone’s culture as a costume
Dressing up as a part of a culture that doesn’t belong to you to be “funny” is cultural appropriation — It’s offensive. Shy away from Native American garb. Shy away from pulling out the sombrero and mariachi combo and leave the kimonos behind.
Everyone wants to dress up as something unique, but when we choose to wear something that is an imitation of someone’s culture, we are disrespecting the significant meaning that belongs to them.
If you’re going for a fictional character or a celebrity from a different country, just be mindful of any cultural specifics like hair, clothing, accessories that could be offensive.
2. DON’T mock someone’s religion
Just like cultural appropriation, costumes that mock religion have become very popular during the Halloween season. Whether it’s a sexy nun, Jesus or any other interpretation of religious deities, it’s an idea that’s been done a billion times.
From a study by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), while the majority of Gen Z believe religion is either not as important as other things or at all, it’s still sacred to other people. Religion may be a concept that has become loosely related to newer generations, though making fun of it means diminishing the experiences and struggles.
Try not to pull a Heidi Klum where you dress up as the goddess Kali for her 2008 costume party, for which she never apologized. There are better costume options, so it’s best to avoid going down the religious route at all.
3. DON’T paint your face a different skin color
Don’t pull a Julianne Hough by packing on a bunch of layers of bronzer to dress up as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren from Orange Is the New Black in 2013, much like Luann de Lesseps, who appeared darker when dressing up as Diana Ross for a costume party in 2018.
The biggest thing to stress this October (and beyond), is to NOT paint your face a different skin color. Painting yourself a color that’s not associated with race is fine as it doesn’t hold any historical significance to it.
Specifically, painting yourself in blackface, brownface, yellowface or red face is tied to centuries-long practices of white Americans using this as a way to mock and make fun of minorities. That’s why it goes deeper than just a Halloween costume.
4. DON’T dress up as victims/controversial human figures
While it may sound crazy, people have started dressing up as victims of tragic historical events. Dressing up as Anne Frank, war survivors, Columbine High School massacre victims and rape victims is NOT okay.
Using these terrible instances as a costume is completely inappropriate and takes away from the traumatic experiences these people went through. Dressing up isn’t a form of honor or giving tribute yourself. It’s disrespectful and just a terrible Halloween costume.
There’s a long list of very problematic beings in history. Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden and Joseph Stalin are just to name a few. To dress up as any of these people would be wrong and comes across as tone deaf.
The same thing goes for serial killers. Especially with the hype of Netflix’s controversial television series, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, which saw a huge surge in Dahmer costumes so much so that Ebay banned the sale of them. We must remember, these are real people who lived in real situations. Dressing up as these people glorifies the acts they’ve committed.
Remember, Halloween is supposed to be fun for everyone. By choosing a costume that is respectful, not only are you being mindful of others, but it also makes the spooky season scary in the best way possible.
Header Image by Stephanie McClintic
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