The Blurred Line Between Costume and Wardrobe
Halloween weekend, 2015.
I’m headed to see a guy I just met perform in an (ostensibly) spooky (ostensibly) comic play at one of North Hollywood’s black box theaters. Beforehand, I duck into Ralphs to snag some Halloween candy, and maybe even something to give post-show to the actor in question, in lieu of flowers.
Six years later, I won’t remember anything about the play, and only a little more about the actor. Instead, what will stand out about this night is the experience of checking out at the North Hollywood Ralphs. As I wait to ring up my peanut butter pumpkins, I look around at the others in line. The thigh-high boots and the bandana-wrapped foreheads, the goth makeup and the miniskirts. It occurs to me that it is Halloween weekend, and I have absolutely no idea who is in costume and who isn’t.
It will be the funniest thing I see all night.
Spring, 2001.
I’m going to my high-school prom with one of my best friends as my date. “Date” only in the technical sense, as this friend is currently dating — in the official sense — a sophomore. According to the arcane-yet-unchallengable rules of our school’s prom policy, underclassman are barred from attending the dance, as are singletons. So Alex and I go together. But his girlfriend comes dress shopping with me in the city.
Many of the dresses we find are hideously expensive; sometimes, they’re just plain hideous. I choose a handful of hopefuls and add to it one screamingly ugly, lime-green dress1 that I simply have to try on, as a joke. It was a jersey-lined mesh halter with both a plunging neckline and a high-cut leg, and its color faded from bright yellow-green to extremely bright yellow-green, the same gradient a scallion must have for Bono. But as soon as I put it on, the girlfriend and I agree. This could be the one, if I dare.
Fast forward to prom, and I’m wearing that lime-green dress; on a hanger, the dress might be ugly, but on my own challengingly-shaped body, some kind of alchemy has occurred. I have never looked or felt more fabulous.
Late Summer (?) Early 2010s?
I’m on a trip to Boston to visit my college-era ride-or-die, Mary. Throughout our friendship, we’ve traveled across cities on trains and buses to search all manner of strange shops for both costumes and personal wardrobe items. And that’s the plan for today as well, with one small but pivotal difference. One of us — probably Mary — has proposed that as we roam from Ross to Filene’s, we consider a personal fashion identity and bring to the dressing room only clothes that, to our eyes, embody that directive. The key is to consider our favorite past looks and follow that thread to its extreme conclusion.2 Mary goes with “Old Lady.” I think of the wild green prom dress and decide my look is “Crazy Person.3” I only choose clothes that make me laugh out loud with their weird audacity. Shockingly (but perhaps not to you, dear reader), nothing I choose looks nearly as unusual in the mirror as it did on the rack. Anything that actually fits my body seems to fit my soul as well, very comfortably.
I buy a poofy satin top covered in colorful splotches. Every time I wear it, someone pays me a compliment.
Halloween weekend, 2016.
A friend’s costume party and a recent flopped film adaptation have inspired me to go all-out this year. I spend hours huge-ifying my hair and coating it with pink spray color (those color-chalk sticks, popular with children and adults alike, are as yet just shy of commonplace). In person, what I’ve done with my hair makes me cackle with glee; on camera, I look pretty normal. (When it comes to hair and makeup, the camera removes 10 pounds.) I dress in my painstakingly curated costume, complete with a lime-green (again!), shoulder-padded, gold-zippered sport jacket and teal patent-leather stilettos. My costume could be mistaken for “generic ‘80s rocker” except for one crucial detail: the rhombus of hot-pink greasepaint around each of my eyes.
I drive all the way to the Valley and teeter into a bustling house-party. Many of the guests are a few years younger than me, but not young enough, in my mind, to be as utterly clueless about my costume as they collectively seem to be. People can see that I’ve gone to great pains, and person after person asks me who I’m supposed to be. When I answer, no one knows the reference. If even one person had looked at me and said, “Hey, Jem! Neat!” It would have all felt worth it. But instead, I feel defeated. My feet hurt from standing in the stilettos, and I can’t have any more to drink because I have to drive back across town to get home.4 I will be shampooing out pink hairspray for a week.
Halloween weekend, 2021.
As Halloween weekend approaches, I find myself with no costume plans, save the vague notion that it would be fun to do my hair and makeup in the style of another decade. Now, the weekend’s here and I have not done much to get my half-baked plan into the oven. After work, I spend a crazed few hours at my favorite Goodwill and, costume-wise, I turn-up only a perfectly ‘70s polyester top that has no tags in it. I think it might have been home-sewn. I can’t quite tell what fashion period it fits into, and I go as far as searching through old Sears Catalogs online to try and match the style to a year, to no success.
I do find some other things I like on my Goodwill trip: an intensely yellow lace garment, not unlike a beltless robe, that I envision wearing like a duster over a dress or pants; a purple-striped, mauve-flowered peasant dress with mother-of-pearl buttons down the front. So, the trip is not a bust, but still, I feel my vague costume plans fading further. I have plans both Saturday and Sunday night, but they’re not overtly holiday-related. I could just go as myself.
I see a tweet that seems to go around every October, to the effect of “Halloween in LA: try to guess who’s in a costume and who’s just eccentric!” I remember the year I first had that same realization while in line at the North Hollywood Ralphs. I remember my own oft-forgotten interest in eccentric fashions, and the way they don’t look so weird on me. An idea forms. I’ll lean into it, the notion of those tweets. I’ll blur the line between costume and wardrobe.
On Saturday, I wear a black dress I found in my closet while searching for the vintage 1970s skirt that I knew I didn’t own5. Over this, my new lacy yellow thing, which I had not purchased with costuming in mind. On my head, I tie a scarf that belonged to my mother. I put on more eyeliner than usual.
The overall effect? I suppose I look a bit like a fortune teller. Or maybe I just look like me. That night, no one asks me who I’m supposed to be.
On Sunday night, I head to a potluck in some jeans and that polyester top. I center-part my hair like I did until I was 16, and tease the back up a little. I brush on some blue eyeshadow that I’d searched heaven and earth to procure6. I top it all off with some brownish aviator sunglasses from Target; it’s nighttime, so I’ll have to wear them on my head like a headband, just like I always do with my sunglasses.
I leave the house knowing that, once again, the nature of this ensemble — costume or not a costume? — is a question of mindset. I could be Gloria Steinem, or Janis Joplin, or Marissa Flaxbart. Judging by how comfortable I feel when I catch myself in the mirror, I think it’s the latter.
My close friends from that era might recognize the color as “go-go green,” a name that I once read on a paint sample card and loudly claimed as my favorite color — EXCEPT for in clothes. Sometimes I wish I were writing this newsletter to you directly FROM my teenage years; we were so gloriously strange.
If you’d like to try this yourself, here are some example words: Clown. Cat lady. Stripper. Yoga teacher. Equestrian. Sephora employee.
Probably not the words I’d use today, FWIW.
Even in the before-times, betting on a Halloween Lyft or Uber in LA was a huge financial gamble. I had heard enough stories of $100 2-mile rides that I didn’t want to risk it. Fucking LA.
I haven’t written much about it here, but it is really hard to shop for vintage clothes as a non-slender person. It is as if there were no fat people in the past. I know that’s not true, but it sometimes feels that way. Recently I nearly dropped $48 on a vintage paisley skirt simply because it fit onto my body. Then I realized I didn’t actually like it that much. Anyway, free business idea. (Plus-sized vintage clothing store, in case that wasn’t clear.)
Shimmery powder-blue is decidedly NOT the eyecolor shade of the moment.