The Celebrity Foothold on Halloween Is Slipping, Y'all
“Gay Halloween ran circles around celebrity Halloween this year.”
“I think we’ve lost the plot a little bit,” Bradley Stern commented on a recent episode of Legends Only. “It’s gone,” remarked his co-host, T. Kyle McMahon. They were speaking about a notable downtick in the output of celebrity costumes this Halloween.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when Halloween became a celebrity-owned and operated holiday. If I had to identify it, though, I would say it was in the mid-2010s with the rise of the Internet listicle. As a former writer of this kind of Internet drivel — “The best and most “oh, they really tried that” celebrity Halloween costumes of 2018” — I can attest that these were consistently some of the most trafficked stories due to the fact that they were search engine optimized. This ecosystem was built on the idea of coalescing what was already out there, but in the case of Halloween, I think it inadvertently created an industrial complex built on competitiveness and, of course, ego.
It makes a lot of sense that celebs would want to own Halloween: They have both the access to the best of the best (stylists, make-up artists, etc.) and a hungry audience ready for the reveal. Having worked on content ideation for a number of high profile clients, I know that a lot of them care greatly (almost to a bizarre extent, at times) about being amongst those that get people talking. This used to be easier when there were less celebrities and the divide between celebrity and civilians was more pronounced.
And then came Heidi. In 2001, Heidi Klum hosted her first ever Halloween celebration dressed as Lady Godiva at Lot 61 in New York City.
The following year she was Betty Boop. Then a golden alien. Then a red witch. Then a vampire. Then a serpent. Then a cat. It was all very conventional. In 2013, she finally found her groove, stepping out as “little old me,” as she called it, which had Klum in full prosthetics, varicose veins and all, looking like Norman Bates’s mother.
From there, she began to elevate her game year after year thanks to the deployment of prosthetics. There was Jessica Rabbit, Fiona from Shrek and most iconically, the worm.
These entries helped earn her the title of the Queen of Halloween, a title she’s now competing for with Macy Blackwell, a viral stay-at-home mom who spends upward of six figures each season.
But after 2022’s worm, Klum’s 2023 peacock felt low-impact.
And while her E.T. this year was obviously impressive, including a glowing fingertip and motorized headpiece with a movable mouth and eyes, controlled remotely — it failed to conjure the weirdness of the worm. It wasn’t timely. It wasn’t original (Janelle Monáe debuted her E.T. days earlier). It seemed like a lot of work for limited return. With prosthetics now essentially status quo, one has to wonder if we’ve reached peak celebrity Halloween costume.
But perhaps worst of all is a trend that seems to trace back to the Kardashians but has weaved its tentacles abound: dressing up solely for the purpose of a photoshoot. “Girl, I don’t know what you want us to do with that,” read one viral tweet lamenting on the phenomenon.
“If you aren’t worming out on a random red carpet like Heidi Klum, we don’t care.”
Even some of our favs like Beyoncé seem to treat the holiday more as a photoshoot opp than a chance to step out and get spooky.
And then there’s simply my biggest qualm: A lack of creativity. Cardi B as Jessica Rabbit, Selena Gomez as Alice in Wonderland, Gwen Stefani as Snow White, Lupita Nyong'o as Storm, Anne Hathaway as a scary Statue of Liberty, Camila Cabello as Regina George, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend as The Flintstones, Chloe Bailey as Velma, Bethenny Frankel as Wonder Woman. I’m not trying to be a hater, but where’s the intrigue? Shout-out to Troye Sivan as Addison Rae and Sabrina Carpenter as Lizzie McGuire, but on the whole, the celebrity quotient of Halloween simply failed to assert its dominance.
It’s not a “we were rooting for you, we were all rooting for you” type of quandary, however, thanks to the advent of gay Halloween, a newly debuted Twitter template that begins with “I hate gay Halloween what do you mean you’re…” and then allows the user to show off their deeply niche, chronically online, pop culture-molded offering. Below, some of the best:
