A word of warning for anyone getting excited about the festive dressing-up of Halloween this month. Try not to get sucked in by Topshop’s Witching Hour collection – black leathers, black lace, skeleton dresses – and start wearing separate ghoulish pieces with everyday clothes. The idea isn’t that we all go gothic for three weeks, it’s that we pick a spooky outfit and go all-or-nothing with masks, face pant and accessories. For one night.
Halloween is an excuse to wear stuff you would never usually wear. Black nail polish = absolutely fine, even if you’d be sacked on the spot if you wore it mid-week. Black wetlook leggings, blood splattered face, go for it. A group of us are planning to make crow/raven costumes for the simple reason that we get to have wings – something I can’t believe I have yet to properly experience in my life, despite the fact that flying is always in my top three superpower wishes.
I also quite wanted to dress as a raven because of the “What kind of bird are YOU?” scene from Moonrise Kingdom by Wes Anderson – which has some good owl, sparrow and dove costume action too – and because the potential is there to act vaguely literary and pretend it has something to do with the 1845 Edgar Allen Poe poem.
Finally – the reason for this post. If you blow £85 on a feather capelet, please resist the urge to wear it with jeans in broad daylight. You’ll just look silly. Remember: all or nothing.
UPDATE: Sexy Crows Part Deux
The crow costumes went down a treat last night, pretty much entirely thanks to the supreme design skills of Samantha Meachin, Lily Dunlop and Emma Goodman. The wings were even comfortable enough to dance to Drop It Like It’s Hot, the ultimate test of a Halloween costume.
Here’s some pics on the various parts of the costume:glittery black masks with a beak made from card and feathers fanning out of the top and fabric wings that were tied round our necks with black ribbon (and tied to our wrists with smaller ribbons).
The wings had ‘feathers’ stapled on, cut out of fabric and card and layered then stapled onto the fabric. Hair was up in messy buns with more black feathers.
This is what we used: masks, black card, black fabric, grey fabric, black feather boas (cut up), shiny Topshop leggings (cut up), glittery black nail polish, face paint, stapler, needle and thread, glue gun. So all in all a pretty cheap alternative to £80 feather capes – though the cutting and stapling did get a little stressful at times. And underneath we all wore black dresses, tights and shoes.
Sorry some of the pictures are blurry – the party was pretty dark. More pics to follow..
