IT’S TIME! 🎃 We have been rounding up the most lamentable, silly, or gross Halloween costumes from the mass market Halloween shops every year for SIXTEEN YEARS now!!?!! Our annual mocking tradition is old enough to get a driver’s license. As always this is just for fun (and not for J*zebel to steal the entire content of and pretend they wrote lol). We love Halloween around here and any excuse to amuse ourselves pawing through seasonal website sections is a good one. 😉

On to the costumes!

“Sexy Renaissance”– No, that’s actually what this is called. It looks like a bad plastic velvet hippie dress. It’s bringing sexy back, but we’d really rather it stayed away if it resembles this itchy cheap nightmare.

“Sexy Strawberry” – Artificial strawberry flavor final boss’ secretary? You can imagine some zealous staff member finding a box of hot pink skirts from unsold 1980s theme costumes way back in the warehouse, and pitching this mess at the board meeting. Sure, sure, throw a print tank top and a pathetic tiny leaf thing in for the hair- Voila! Barely Berry.

Bird Shit- If you saw this approaching you at the bar Halloween night, you likely wouldn’t assume “emu”… If you cut the face off of it for 2028 Halloween you get two costumes in one purchase! *fart noise*

Blood Magic- This would be a great costume if you work at Tampax head office!

A MAN!!!!!! – Nothing scarier, ;). This just looks like some company printed the face of one of their janitorial staff onto a mask. He’s someone’s dad. Do you know this man? Sure he has a unibrow and a missing tooth, but that’s just some dude.

Same AI Broad for Infinity- This is the first Halloween round up where we get to shit talk artificial intelligence and how it’s infiltrated online shopping! And also costumes! YAY! None of these photos are real. On the left you get several identical Mormon blogger ladies with the same facial expression all wearing a lame ghost sack. In the middle you get AI tights that will fit you if your legs are literally (concerningly) 7 feet long. On the right we have the same AI generated hot girl that every brand seems to develop. Does this mean AI has a fetish for “white and looks 13 but isn’t” or just embarrassing tech bros? Why is it always the same face on these ai girls? I assume the machine is replicating this aesthetic by training on itself like a shitty ouroboros literally no one asked for.

N’est Pas Une Costume- It doesn’t even exist!!! They didn’t even make ONE to take photos of! Whoever makes these doesn’t respect their customers enough to even construct one of their ugly ideas for them to see it. Do people really fall for these 100% ai images on shopping sites? You KNOW this dress is going to be a terrible digital print full of pixels on the cheapest, shiniest, plastic fabric if you did buy it. It’s Shien, it’s AI, it’s the pinnacle of depressing capitalistic bullshit.

Chicken- It’s really hard not to make euphemistic KFC slogan jokes here. Why are there no feathers involved in this thing? Why does she have to wear a hideous tangly white grass skirt and bra?! The claw shoe covers are especially fetching. Cluck cluck fuck no.

If You Hate Halloween (And Yourself)- Does your office make you dress up for the holiday? Do you hate Halloween and also your body being perceived? Here is seasonal depression as a costume! Just for you! Lazy costume, just slap a little ribcage on the middle of a polyester sack. (I’m truly sorry to anyone feeling awful about themselves this fall. We live in a hellscape of pedophilic beauty standards engineered by old losers in an office, manufacturing insecurities in people to sell them things is monstrous and resisting it is difficult for the best of us).

Farm Aid – Old McDonald had a farm, e i e i oh! And on that farm he had a ho… Ahem. The ai image of just a girl in a sparkling club dress wearing a rubber alpaca (llama?) mask is so strange. It’s like a still from a GenZ horror movie where the kids go around axe murdering people dressed as farm animals. Purge of the Barnyard. Peta is gonna love that movie (when they take a break from euthanizing almost every animal that comes into their care lol sigh).

ANANAS‘ Hillbilly Cousin– Anyone else emotionally scarred by the rubber pineapple puppet that taught us French? No? Is that just a Canadian thing? Either way this is supposed to be a pineapple and is in fact available at more than one giant costume retailer! Hooary! It also looks like something you could make with some dollar store poster board instead. Bonus points if you buy this and then glue a pizza costume to the back of it, and offend all the people who get really wound up about appropriate pizza toppings.

Anyway, Happy Almost Halloween! We hoped you liked the round up of Bad Costumes. 🙂

-Tae