Have you ever wondered if you have a doppelgänger out there somewhere (or, worse, if you’re the doppelgänger . . . ew . . . )? It’s now likelier than ever before, thanks to explosive population growth. As a scientist pointed out in a recent New York Times article, there are only so many ways to design a face: “Now there are so many people in the world that the system is repeating itself.”
The system? Whatever matrix we’re in, it’s clear that our identities are at risk. Costumes, from lash extensions to monster masks, are critical tools for expressing our individuality—indeed, our very sense of humanity. 🫶 So let’s figure out the best.
To my knowledge, the nudes have never been recovered. I’m hopeful that by the time the house is cleared out for an estate sale and the CD resurfaces, the technology required for viewing it will be obsolete and unavailable.
Sexy Costumes
In 2005, I gave someone a compact disc of my most tasteful nudes and he immediately lost it somewhere in his parents’ house. Since then, having developed an aversion to overexposure, I’ve avoided sexy costumes, but I’m mature enough to recognize that it’s still a very valid category.
To my knowledge, the nudes have never been recovered. I’m hopeful that by the time the house is cleared out for an estate sale and the CD resurfaces, the technology required for viewing it will be obsolete and unavailable.
I highly, highly recommend this show! At one point Kendra approaches a guest at the mansion and says, “Can I ask you something? I don’t know if it’s too personal, but have you ever been in an Olive Garden?” 🍝
Around the same time that my CD went missing, the reality show The Girls Next Door premiered, a series depicting the lives of Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends as they lived sister wife–style in the Playboy Mansion. Holly is the uptight alpha girlfriend, Bridget is a bubbly grad student, and Kendra is a dumb jock who’s halfheartedly pursuing a certificate in massage therapy. Their lives are a costume party, and the costumes are always sexy. In addition to dressing for themed grotto parties and magazine shoots, the girlfriends must earn their room and board by looking hot 24/7 for Hef, depicted as a dotard who insists on bringing pork chops from home the one time the girlfriends manage to get him out to a club.
I highly, highly recommend this show! At one point Kendra approaches a guest at the mansion and says, “Can I ask you something? I don’t know if it’s too personal, but have you ever been in an Olive Garden?” 🍝
I’ve never been prouder of anyone than I was of Holly when she bravely defied Hef and styled her hair in Princess Leia buns, which he didn’t think were attractive on her.
The girlfriends are the platonic ideal of Y2K sexuality, expressed in bold strokes that play well on low-def CRT screens. The spray tans and square-tipped French manicures are the new bunny suits, which now look as quaint as Civil War–era porn. Their style is extreme and the setting is shabby, heightening the sense that they’re actors wandering around backstage in their official wardrobe. The mansion is a shut-in’s lair, crowded with vitamin bottles, piles of laundry, flat irons, dusty fake plants, and beige carpet stained with Pekingese accidents. The girlfriends have a 9 pm curfew, and the butler is tense: he must prepare chicken fingers for Kendra, sterilize vibrators, feed the estate peacocks, and procure quaaludes deadstock for Hef to use as coercive party favors. Holly later confessed that she was suicidal.
The sexiness is an illusion, as two-dimensional as a centerfold (lol). The costumes really work. They’re fun and tacky, so cartoonish it’s hard to conceive of the girlfriends as being real, potentially unhappy people.
As for the rest of us, it’s nice to dream of a sexy costume making a big impression—but realistically, the person most likely to be affected is the one wearing it. It can be a fun high . . . or an exhausting evening spent tugging up a strapless bra. It’s a waste of time in this day and age, just like Playboy. There’s porn online now (fyi), so nothing we wear can really match its impact. We might as well relax!
I’ve never been prouder of anyone than I was of Holly when she bravely defied Hef and styled her hair in Princess Leia buns, which he didn’t think were attractive on her.
Celebrity Costumes
Per the above doppelgänger newsflash, celebrities are becoming obsolete. There will always be a duplicate to be sourced, a convenient clone roaming the streets in the other hemisphere. As if they sense this impending obsolescence, celebrities frantically participate in the pageantry of Halloween, even though they already dress up in costumes for their jobs (for which they receive plenty of attention). Please, don’t be greedy. Sit this one out. It’s for the rest of us.
Heidi Klum is a paramount example of a celebrity flagrantly bankrupting the attention economy. Halloween costumes are her thing (grow up.) Maybe she’s drawn to the liberation of not having to look attractive for one day a year, although those ape breasts are arguably erotic. Her elaborate costumes are so rigidly, literally expressed that they just feel like a makeup artist’s portfolio. Also, some revealing gossip: a wing designer (whose highly specialized career took him from Angels in America to the Victoria’s Secret runway show) let slip that Heidi always demanded the biggest angel wings in the Victoria’s Secret show, which is outrageous. Does she think she’s better than Tyra?
Speaking of, Tyra Banks is an exception to my Halloween celebrity ban. I’m enchanted by her transformation into “her business hero Richard Branson,” as well as the general concept of a “Business Hero.” 💼 The costume looks almost homemade, and it’s fun that she’s still recognizable. I don’t even begrudge her the extra attention points she’s getting by dragging another celebrity into the mix. That’s just good business sense!
Beyond Halloween are the trappings of everyday celebrity identity maintenance. The first time I ever thought about celebrity grooming (and I haven’t stopped since), I was an impressionable child reading Esquire at the dentist’s office. The long-running column “10 Things You Don’t Know About Women” was written by a different famous woman each month. I read it closely, seeking mentorship: I felt I had as much to learn about women as the average Esquire man. Most guest columnists took a flirty, coy tone, dishing out allegedly inherent feminine truths like, “We love getting our necks kissed!” (Petra Nemcova, 2003 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover model). But I’ve never forgotten Ana Gasteyer’s shocking contribution: “We shave our toes.”
The heiress to this school of radical transparency is Chrissy Teigan. She’s a Petra, but cosplays as an Ana in a (successful) gambit for maximum attention. She has her issues, but I cherish her frank, forensic explanations of all the work she’s had done, from armpit liposuction to eyebrow transplants. Her art direction of Dr. Diamond skillfully dances along the line between rigorous grooming and outright fraud.
Brad Pitt isn’t as fun to watch. He has a case of the Heidis, prone to unsolicited sartorial outbursts, and, like Heidi capitalizing on a makeup artist’s creativity, he mooches off others to make a statement. He’s spent decades copying his girlfriends’ style, and recently has begun nibbling Harry Styles’ already-derivative look (Team Pine 🌲 btw). Brad’s execution of the genderblind, Gen-Z-Ken-doll aesthetic comes off like someone who can phonetically read a language aloud but has no idea what they’re saying. When an interviewer asked him why he wore a skirt to a premiere, he responded as if cornered and afraid: “I don’t know! We’re all going to die, so let’s mess it up.”
Sweet, simple bro. He’s right about death, though, and it’s on everyone’s minds. That’s why youth is the real celebrity costume. Filler-filled Instagram faces define a vague, ageless generation. Someone who’s opted out of aging, face unburdened by context, is indulging in corporeal gentrification that results in the human version of a “modern barn”-themed Airbnb renovation.
Think twice before you pick up face paint. Think twice before you pick up face paint.
Topical Costumes
I don’t like these either. Sorry for all the duds in this listicle!
Topical costumes are the costume equivalent of small talk about the weather. Plus, this is the most-likely-to-be-racist category. Think twice before you pick up face paint.
Social (Climbing) Style
I hate to sound like a newly radicalized tween with a Che Guevara poster, but really, don’t we all wear costumes every day? It’s easy to pick on Brad Pitt, but what about the rest of us?????????
Pre–social media, summer vacation meant that classmates outside your immediate social circle dropped off the face of the earth. With the student body lacking any sense of object permanence in regards to you or your style, it was easier to debut a new look. The first day of school brought many young mall goths scurrying out of the cobwebbed closet, building a new persona around a core investment piece: an XXXL ball chain choker or a prestige pair of JNCOs with the circumference of a ballgown (Heidi, I swear to god . . . ).
At a relatively advanced age, thanks to Sean John, I had a valuable breakthrough and finally learned that “Sean” was pronounced “Shawn,” not “Seen.” Wild!
Psychology Today notes that people typically dress up “as the things they are most scared of” in order to feel they’ve conquered those fears; that sadly tracks with my bodysuit as a sort of fun-loving, trendy-gal costume.
Like the goths, I woke up one day and made a fresh choice: to wear a skintight, stretch-denim lace-up Forever 21 tube top/bodysuit to school. It doesn’t look so extreme now in the free-for-all Shein microtrend era, but it was a big statement (still not sure of what) in a school ruled by a two-party system of Abercrombie or Goth (with a Nader-sized FUBU/Sean John contingent). My best friend wore a matching bodysuit, and when she came to pick me up for school, my mom made us pose for a picture on the front lawn. It was all fun and games until I realized we didn’t have any classes together, and I spent the day alone, freezing, half-naked, and praying the faux-leather corset strings would hold. It was my Parisian night suit moment. Since then, instead of the common anxiety dream of being naked at school, I dream of my bodysuit day.
At a relatively advanced age, thanks to Sean John, I had a valuable breakthrough and finally learned that “Sean” was pronounced “Shawn,” not “Seen.” Wild!
Psychology Today notes that people typically dress up “as the things they are most scared of” in order to feel they’ve conquered those fears; that sadly tracks with my bodysuit as a sort of fun-loving, trendy-gal costume.
Other poser purchases that I now regret:
A black nylon messenger bag from the Gap. I thought it looked like a Prada purse but I later saw Ross Gellar carrying it on Friends.
A pair of Dickies in a cute green color. Changing clothes at a sleepover, I was forced to make the humiliating disclosure that the pants were from the Dickies x Urban Outfitters collaboration. I had stolen valor.
A pinstripe miniskirt with matching bustier from Express. I paired it with stilettos, a zip-up Zuckerberg-style hoodie, and a positive attitude for all my entry-level job interviews.
Although I retired the business bustier 💋 many years ago, I still consider business casual a tricky category, and the most pretentious disguise of all; no one is inherently a professional, let alone a casual one. I never quite got the hang of it. To meet the dress code at my first retail job, I defaulted to all black, but I was driven insane by the fact that my black shirts were inevitably a different shade than my single pair of black “slacks,” which themselves were nothing but trouble. Once, the zipper jammed and I had to wait all day to pee, rushing home after my shift to cut myself out of the pants.
The business heartbreaks kept coming. I was dismayed to learn that “reconciling,” a gentle-sounding task for which I eagerly volunteered, referred to doing math at the cash register. This was the same dangerous vocabulary instinct that made me regard my chronic “overdraft” as a generous breeze, delivering free money.
I was disappointed that the clothes didn’t make me any smarter or more professional. Part of the problem was that even when I wore my TJ Maxx blazer, I felt downtrodden alongside the always-new clothes at work, although they were for children; I worked at an upscale baby gear boutique. Very upscale—a couple once got into a fight at my register when the husband realized the baby shoes they were buying cost $370.
“No offense, but this is insane,” he told me, snatching them out of the shopping bag. “I don’t even spend $370 on my own shoes.”
I resisted looking at his feet to see what his reasonably priced shoes looked like, thinking it might seem judgmental. It was an incredible feat of willpower, and I felt virtuous the rest of the afternoon.
Business casual sux.
The Best 🏅
Some friends of mine died in particularly violent ways in the early 2000s, which happened to be the height of the nation’s regrettable zombie obsession. Octobers were full of zombie pub crawls, and there were always people dressed as rotting corpses brushing past me on the street. Most of the costumes were amateur, but some were surprisingly realistic, which I resented. I wanted people to prove they’d seen the real thing (a dead person, not a zombie) before they got to frolic around having FUN with the concept. I’d always been scared of gory costumes, but now I was able to reject them on the much more satisfying basis of being morally offended.
But even though I’m someone who typically can’t handle reading a ghost story unless it’s sunny outside, I like Halloween. And there are plenty of options for good costumes! These drag-Hocus Pocus witches are festive, this intergenerational clone is simply adorable, and this shadow legitimately freaks me out, yet doesn’t rely on gratuitous gore. I love a chaste optical illusion! Ultimately, I have to agree with the local orthodontist’s office that awarded this head-in-a-jar costume first place; the designer, Louise of chaoticallyyours.com, is our winner.
🎃,
Molly
