When your Halloween costume is a meme

We can agree that some Halloween costumes are very niche, and the best of them require a special kind of intelligence to come up with. Ordinary costumes only require you to recognise a character. Ironic, niche costumes are funny because the person who came up with them observed something oddly specific. I call it observational comedy, and I wish I were smart enough to come up with costumes like that.

Some people notice unremarkable things. You have to be very smart to be able to synthesize a very specific observation into a costume, like the energy of someone who works in human resources, the person who goes to a certain kind of party, or the girl who peaked in high school and now looks 68 at 32.

These niche costumes work like inside jokes, and It’s funny to try to guess what they are before the person in costume tells you. In the end, Halloween is about being creative and having fun; we can’t be dressing like vampires in 2026- archetypes have changed! We can dress as bots now. This Halloween, I’m going to try to make an invisible cultural reference suddenly visible. It’s a race to notice the next best thing.

Since when have costumes had to be concrete? Even in ancient Greek theatre, people dressed as concepts. Costume has always been capable of making an abstraction visible. Abstraction in costume, or even in humor, is not an inherently modern thing, or necessarily derived from internet culture. Ancient drama drew on allegory, just like any other art form. Ancient abstract ideas were given names, forms, colors, symbols, just like we do with memes now.

What’s mostly changed is the material people derive the concepts from. Rather than personifying Love or Liberty, we represent the overly performative male feminist or the bald Demi Lovato meme.

If you want to go as Dracula, that’s up to you, though. Coming up with something original takes a lot of work, and Halloween is also a night to have fun and enjoy, whether you’re watching a movie with your friend or at the biggest costume party ever.

It’s a night where you’re allowed to temporarily stop being yourself. Like at a carnival, anything can happen, and you can explore well beyond the limits of your identity. Every culture has found ways to make festivities around this concept.

Some people confront their fears by ridiculing them with costumes on Halloween, and maybe we can do the same thing with our online anxieties. It’s a celebration of disguise and transformation, and we can add our little twist to it.

People have used disguise to make ideas tangible, and we’re no different; it’s just that our ideas have become more complex. Maybe our most avant-garde costumes will look ancient and innocent to our descendants, and Dracula will be long forgotten by them. It’s fun to try to guess what they will dress as. Will their definition of  period costume be dressing like us?