Trick-or-Trend?
Hallow’s Eve is a time for the year’s most talked about PR blunders and pop culture stories to materialize in the form of costume. Gone are the days of tossing a sheet over your head and calling yourself a ghost. You must walk a fine line in your costume choice: Ironic, but not too ironic. Clever but not too obscure. Comfortable, or daringly uncomfortable. Above all, the importance of a costume comes down to timeliness. What will be this year’s Anna and Elsa, unless again, it’s Anna and Elsa?
Here are our predictions for this year’s most popular Halloween costumes:
I still can’t figure out this damn dress. Described as a “viral phenomenon,” this dress is still blowing my mind. I, like many others, saw white and gold – was told the colors would “switch” – and they DID. It’s a blue and black dress. It’s as simple as that. This one dress and its 2-4 colors polarized social media users – with 10 million tweets in the first week. The mystery of “The Dress” will remain, and the Blue/Black and White/Gold teams will continue to feud.
Costume materials: A dress, in blue and black. Or white and gold?
This is perhaps the most timely and localized prediction for a 2015 Halloween costume. This month, Niagara Falls got a new mascot: Mayor Paul Dyster introduced the world to Mr. Totes McGoats, an average-looking Niagara Falls local with a goat-masked face and an affinity for recycling. That’s right – the world. The Huffington Post, Esquire, Mashable, and other national publications fell in love with Mr. McGoats. It’s possible that the collective Buffalo/Niagara Falls regional perception was further tarnished when pop culture welcomed this goat man hybrid and his colored past into the fold – but whatever floats your goat.
Costume materials: Goat mask. That’s it.
What a time to be alive! A true tale of celebrity: you grab one of New York City’s famed slices of pizza, and in a train station – you’re discovered, instantly becoming an internet sensation. Pizza Rat is the cat-in-a-shark-costume-chases-duck-while-on-a-roomba of our time. That little rat has millions of YouTube views, is at center of a heated trademark battle over the phrase “Pizza Rat,” and the New Yorker published a story detailing P.R.’s favorite pizza joints throughout NYC and the harrowing journeys required to get to each.
Costume materials: Pizza – on your head or in your mouth
January 18, 2015 is a day that most Buffalonians feel strongly about. The New England Patriots won the AFC Championship Game against the Indianapolis Colts with what was later determined to be tampered-with footballs. According to a credible source, Wikipedia, “…the requisites of fairness and due process” were missing from the process leading to the imposition of the Tom Brady’s penalty for the incident. Well, Mr. Brady, it sounds like there was something else missing on that January day (air in the footballs).
Costume materials: deflated footballs; some iteration of Tom Brady cheating