In October 2008, a group of bloggers, vloggers, and Internet enthusiasts met at Fontana’s, a shuttered bar on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “Dress up as your favorite meme or viral video star,” read the (electronic) invitation to the event, sponsored by archive site Know your meme and Urlesque, an Internet culture site that closed in 2011.
“HallowMEME,” as it was known, only lasted as an annual tradition until early 2010, but the change it signaled or helped foster isn’t just with us — it’s more powerful than ever.
After all, a specific meme-centric event seems redundant when internet-inspired costumes have become the norm. This year, according to Google “Friesgeest” – a creepy-themed site that tracks the most popular costume ideas – viral Australian Olympic breakdancer Raygun is the second most searched for costume in America. TikTok is also flooded with explainers about how to dress up Moo Dengthe Thai pygmy hippopotamus that, for reasons unknown, is one of the internet’s current obsessions. (Online marketplace Etsy even has one landing page dedicated to hippo-inspired looks.) Other costumes you might expect include the Oompa Loompa and the mysterious “Unknown” from Glasgow’s disastrous “Willy Wonka experience”, which went viral when it looked like Fyre Festival, and maybe a context-heavy coconut falling from Kamala Harris’ tree or JD Vance’s beloved sofa.
Halloween is now a digital holiday. Even if you don’t dress up this year, you’re probably consuming the #content of those who do. There’s been a noticeable shift from creepy or even Hollywood-inspired costumes to meme-inspired looks. These internet-friendly costumes reflect a desire for attention, show the world that we’re in on the joke, and make it clear that both social media and Halloween are more culturally relevant than ever.
I grew up in Scotland – a country that can reasonably do that claim that I invented “Hallowe’en,” and as a kid I remember adults complaining about a gradual shift from handmade horror-themed costumes to mass-produced pop culture costumes, which was attributed to the “Americanization” of the holiday. Lisa Mortonauthor of “Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween,” says this shift had been going on for more than half a century before internet memes came into the fray. For example, it was in the 1950s that costumes became a major retail activity in the US, as costume companies like Collegeville And Ben Kuiper bought the licensing rights to film and television characters, from Superman to Donald Duck. (At the time, she adds, “only about half” of the costumes were “ghostly oriented.”)
According to Morton, the gay community played an important role in making Halloween for adults in the 1970s: “Before that, Halloween was almost exclusively for children. Then counterculture groups, like LGBTQ+ people, came along and said, ‘No, this can be an adult holiday – and we’ll claim it.’ ”
By the turn of the millennium, “sexy” Halloween costumes had become a cultural norm, especially for women. “About 10 to 15 years ago, about 90 percent of the retail market for women’s suits was ‘sexy,’” says Morton. “If you were a woman who didn’t want to dress like that, you were kind of out of luck.” Popular culture regularly reflects these trends back to us. In the first ‘Sex and the City’ film, released in 2008, Cynthia Nixon’s Miranda Hobbes exasperatedly acknowledges the trend: “That’s it?!” she says, bewildered by the costume options in a store. “The only two choices for women, witch and sexy kitten.” And in 2004’s ‘Mean Girls’,In Tina Fey’s foundational text about the Millennial experience, homeschooler Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) serves the zombie bride at a party where her new friends, “the Plastics,” are dressed as a bunny, Catwoman, and a “sexy” mouse. “In the girl world,” she says, “Halloween is the one night of the year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”
The rise of the meme costume can be seen as an outgrowth of the trends that came before it, but today the main thrust is attention.
“Attention is the most powerful currency in the world today,” says journalist Taylor Lorenz, author of ‘Extremely online” and founder of the new tech and online culture publication User magazine. “And Halloween is a chance to get as much of that as possible.” In 2010, the first VidCon – a conference of influencers, fans and online brands – was held in Los Angeles. Lorenz says this was “the beginning of people wanting to bring online culture into reality,” which was not coincidentally around the same time that subcultures became much more influential online. “We started to see a break from the internet,” she says, “where Halloween costumes started to reference online subcultures and specific internet moments.”
Influencers and celebrities have played a central role in Halloween becoming more of a digital spectacle, and more meme-centric too. The Kardashians take Halloween for example terribly serious and in editorial style photo shoots every year in elaborate costumes. Last year things got very ‘meta’ when Kourtney Kardashian dressed as her sister, Kim Kardashian, in the floral dress she wore to her very first Met Gala in 2013. (The dress spawned countless memes, including comparisons to “Mrs. Doubtfire”). Kim says these jokes brought her to tears at the time, but Kourtney’s costume cemented its power as an instantly recognizable image.
Lorenz thinks influencers have embraced Halloween in part because fall is a time of high consumer spending. “Fall content is performing very well, kids are going back to school and internet usage that dropped in the summer is going up again in the fall,” she says. “Halloween is right in the middle of the season when influencers make the most money, so a viral costume is a great way to draw attention to your content.”
Halloween will also be a digital first among the ‘normies’. I first noticed this around 2016, when Donald Trump was a surprisingly popular costume choice. Trump symbolized the convergence of politics, entertainment and internet power – a spectacle that spawned an endless stream of memes. (That year, my roommates and I dressed up as zookeepers, a baby, and a gorilla, in tribute to Harambe, the silverback who was shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo and somehow became an internet sensation.) Last year, TikTok released a press release instructing users on how to maximize their Halloween experience on the app. And despite the fact that in-person habits like trick-or-treating have steadily declined in the U.S., Morton tells me the post-COVID-19 years are among the biggest ever for consumer spending. Costume companies once dictated what people wore, but now that social media is creating its own characters and jokes, they’re playing catch-up.
“E-commerce sites have such fast production timelines these days, which they can use to turn meme costumes into reality,” says Lorenz. Companies like Spirit Halloween – which went viral in 2022 when social media users jokingly suggested their own hyper-specific costume ideas – “being able to respond much more quickly to pop culture references.”
The rise of meme costumes can also be seen as a desire for relevance, says Anastasia Denisova, author of ‘Internet memes and society“And senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, which gives “a sense of camaraderie and exclusivity” to those who unite around them. Whether you’re posting online or incorporating memes into a Halloween costume, such references confirm that you’re in on the joke.
This is especially pronounced in the LGBTQ+ community, which has been influential in shaping both modern Halloween and contemporary meme culture. Last year my feed was flooded with the “I hate gay Halloween parties”, meme, which poked fun at the trend towards hyper-specific queer costumes and the love of obscure references. If costumes can “define the community you are part of,” as Morton says, what could be more ambitious in today’s world than being part of a group that more better informed than everyone else? That could also explain why the memes that inspire costumes are becoming more and more niche: once everyone gets a joke, it’s time to look for a new one.
Of course, there’s also fear that comes with the urge to find the ultimate meme-inspired costume. While Morton and Lorenz both see Halloween as a “safe zone” to explore what scares us, or to test the limits of good taste, the same internet that provides the memes can also be very unforgiving about its deployment. “Memes are known to ruin people’s reputations. Anyone can take a photo, add a caption, post it online and things can quickly get out of hand,” says Denisova. “[Memes] are ironic and often sarcastic, which can sometimes make them mean, inappropriate or offensive.”
Yet the ubiquity of social media is only part of the explanation for the power and dangers of the meme-inspired costume. It wouldn’t have been possible if the age-old tradition wasn’t already so flexible.
“We’re definitely seeing a huge shift happening in social media,” says Morton. “Halloween is unrecognizable compared to even 50 years ago. It just keeps changing and changing its identity.”
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This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
