Last-Minute Costume Ideas

Need some costume ideas this Halloween? Are you in a panic to find a cheap, affordable, inexpensive, shoddy, half-assed, borderline offensive costume? Well, you've come to the right place!

1) Stereotypical Frenchie/Insert Nationality You Wish to Insult
Go to your local Forever 21/H&M/Marshalls/whatever cheap clothing store is nearby and buy a striped shirt and beret. Go to a bakery and buy a baguette. Carry the baguette as a prop.

If you are in France, merely recycle clothes from your closet and use the half-eaten bit of baguette that is still lingering from lunchtime.

(Yes, I am being sarcastic.)

Nota bene: this costume is probably not that good of an idea if you are in France, as it would merely look as if you are just walking home from the boulangerie sporting a simple marinière and, for some quirky reason, a beret.

For those of you with a bigger budget who want to poke fun at us Americans, you have two Stereotypical American options: the Country/Cowboy toting a (hopefully) fake gun, or the poorly-dressed "People of Wal-Mart"-esque American clutching for dear life to a greasy McDonald's bag (with Diet Coke) and riding an obesity scooter while holding a 'Murica #1 foam finger. The obesity scooter may be fashioned out of a bike and some painted cardboard boxes. Fat suit may or may not be required.

2) Mummy
Use white toilet paper to fashion a shirt and a pair of trousers for the mummy's bandages.

Warning: While white toilet paper is available, be careful using French toilet paper as it comes in shades of pink, blue, yellow, lavender and orange. These colors may prove inadequate to fabricate a mummy costume.

Be jealous of my pink toilet paper. (It was orange last week.)

On the other hand, you could potentially use the different colored toilet paper to be a gay-friendly Mummy.


3) Fumbling 20-Something Who Has No Idea What to Do with His/Her Life

Wait. That may not be an actual costume. Skip this option.


4) A SWAG-YOLO Bro

The clothing choices required are enough to scare anybody: wife-beater, '80s-style sneakers and an awkwardly-perched baseball cap with the not-removed shiny stickers are a must. Don't forget to accessorize with some fake tan, bling and those weird shutter sunglasses that probably only exist to impair your vision while giving your face the oddest tan lines ever.

This costume will prove to be highly-effective among your Hipster friends who know you are ironically donning the SWAG-YOLO Bro look for personal amusement.


5) Hipster

This costume will prove to be highly-effective among your SWAG-YOLO Bro friends who know you are ironically donning the Hipster look for personal amusement.

Get a haphazard variety of clothes from a local Goodwill/Salvation Army. Or, at a push, steal the clothes off a homeless man's/Hipster's back for a more authentic costume. Don't forget to accessorize with dyed hair (preferably an unnatural color), a handlebar mustache and pair of black, nerdy horn-rimmed glasses that you would have never, ever dreamt of wearing twenty years ago for the fear of oncoming ridicule by your peers.

6) Zombie

Stay up the night before getting absolutely blind drunk. Walk around the whole day plastered with a murderous hangover that renders you incapable of processing any cognitive thought and keeps you in a moribund, yet somehow still functioning, state. Accessorize with fake blood and a plastic severed limb.

I feel that I must stress the fake blood and the plastic severed limb part of the costume lest you want to actually kill someone simply for talking to you.


7) Nothing

For those of you who really can't be bothered to dress up at all but would still like to update the social media, upload a childhood photograph of yourself in a costume.

The more embarrassing, the better.

Here's a picture of Bibi (Yours Truly) wearing a pumpkin costume accessorized with a pumpkin treat bucket. This photograph documents the origins of my hatred for hermetically-sealed furniture. Thank God the trend to wrap sofas in plastic went the way of the crimped, high-volume hairdo. (New Jersey, circa late 1989)

Bonne chance with the costume preparation.

Happy Halloween,
Barb the French Bean