Halloween has gone full brain rot

Are meme costumes destroying the holiday or helping us process our internet-mediated reality?

On May 31st, 2009, the internet culture news site Urlesque and Know Your Meme co-hosted a party called "A Night to ReMEMEber” where attendees were instructed to dress up as their favorite internet meme. The party attracted popular Tumblr creators, early YouTubers, bloggers, and internet enthusiasts. It was such a hit that the organizers decided to join up again that fall to host the first ever official “HallowMeme”.

HallowMeme was an annual party in New York where hundreds of young millennials and Gen Xers dressed up as their favorite chronically online references. The event was a wild success and got so big that it eventually expanded to Los Angeles. HallowMeme marked a time when memes, and the online videos they were often borne from, were just becoming mainstream.

Now, 15 years later, the online world is our default reality and Halloween costumes have gone full brain rot. One of the most popular Halloween costumes for children this year is Skibidi Toilet (as in the YouTube series). The internet is overrun with guides explaining how to dress up as the Hawk Tuah girl or whatever viral ephemera is currently trending on Google. And, for the second year in a row, thousands of people on Twitter are poking fun at LGBTQ people’s obscure online references in their Halloween costumes.

The shift toward a chronically online Halloween has been happening for a while. In 2012, just three years after the first HallowMeme, CNN ran a special report on memes inspiring Halloween costumes. A 2013 piece for WIRED documented how “dressing up as an internet meme” was becoming more popular. Vice lamented the rise of meme costumes, claiming that those who indulge in them have “Buzzfeed as their homepage and they’re all too socially awkward to look up from their phones long enough to actually talk to one another.”

During this time the “social butterfly” costume took off, largely thanks to tumblr, where groups of hyper online young women dressed up as the different social networks. Costumes referencing the online world continued to grow in popularity throughout the 2010s as the internet and social platforms played a bigger role in all of our lives.

While the meme costumes on display at HallowMeme were hand made, as internet culture seeped deeper into public consciousness, ecommerce outlets sought to commodify the online world for profit. Spirit Halloween sped up their production to issue more timely Halloween costumes related to events and online characters. Yandy, a lingerie company, began creating “sexy” costumes of online references that repeatedly went viral. They produced a sexy “pizza rat” costume in 2015 and a sexy undecided voter costume based on Ken Bone the next year.

But this rise in meme costumes also created a culture clash. News articles and pundits bemoaned the online world’s influence on Halloween and pined for a world when everyone would dress up as ghosts and goblins. “‘The Dress’ is now this year’s most annoying Halloween costume,” read one headline from 2015.

In an essay for Slate titled “This Halloween, Don’t Dress Up Like a Meme”, cultural critic Amanda Hess implored readers to “be done with ‘clever’ interpretations of VMA appearances and costumes based on niche YouTube stars.... Stop fixating on pop culture phenomena and start mining the depths of human grotesqueness.”

“Halloween, at its best, is an opportunity to shed our bodies of the cultural insignia that rule our everyday lives and to step into an otherworld for an evening,” she continued. “Costuming ourselves in the emblems of the Internet news cycle—or in the case of Ironic Sexy Halloween Costumes, the Internet rage cycle—deflates the mystery of the holiday and moors the evening in the most banal aspects of the culture we’re attempting to escape.”

The last HallowMeme party took place in 2015. By that point memes had become so commonplace that every Brooklyn Halloween house party contained at least a handful of hyper-online costumes. "Internet culture IS mainstream culture," HallowMeme’s farewell post declared. Meme costumes were becoming so self aware that Steve Buscemi dressed as his own meme for Halloween. WIRED declared meme costumes dead in 2019.

But in recent years, as internet culture fully penetrated the masses in part due to the pandemic forcing everyone more online, referencing an online moment directly was suddenly no longer enough. People began layering online and cultural references on top of each other into increasingly esoteric and inscrutable costumes.

The nicheifying of Halloween costumes is compounded by viralflation, in which inflated metrics and algorithmic feeds have made viral content more frequent yet more fleeting than ever. The explosion of online subcultures and the death of a monoculture also means that we all have fewer and fewer shared references, even on the internet.

Meme costumes were originally about creating community and bonding with a small number of other online weirdos. There was joy in encountering a potential friend dressed up as a woman laughing alone with salad and knowing that you occupied the same online world. Now, every Halloween costume feels like a test to see how many layered internet references you can recognize.

Kate Lindsey wrote about this phenomenon at The Atlantic, arguing that “obscure meme costumes are sucking the joy from the holiday.”

“A moment that should be one of immediate recognition and joy,” she writes, “becomes a lengthy, borderline-inscrutable conversation I had no idea I would be saddled with when I tried to make small talk. Instead of connecting, I feel alienated, and not just because I don’t understand. Within seconds of embarking on these conversations, it becomes clear the costumes aren’t intended for my—or any other partygoer’s—consumption. They’re for our phones.

That’s where the costume will be appreciated, and where people can reenact the video required for it to make sense. That’s where the wearer can debut the outfit to an online community that needs no explanation for ‘JoJo Siwa’s ‘Karma’ dance’ or ‘the concept of ‘demure.’’ I, a fellow partygoer, become relegated to the backdrop of a social-media post.”

The irony of all of this is that costumes made for the internet fade more quickly than ever. Before writing this piece I did a deep dive through photos of the first HallowMeme party on Flickr. Take a look through and tell me how many memes and online references you recognize today.

Still, I can’t bring myself to come out against meme costumes! Half the fun of Halloween is being creative, and the internet is a wellspring of costume-worthy material.

While people argue for a return to witches, ghosts, and goblins, meme costumes allow for a level of self-expression beyond what’s offered by the traditional wardrobe. Donning a meme costume acknowledges that reality today is primarily mediated by the internet, and Halloween allows us to memorialize those meaningful online moments that are increasingly ephemeral. A good meme costume captures the zeitgeist while allowing the wearer to process and express their own relationship to the online world.

So, if you want to dress up as an Instagram post Rebecca Black liked one time, or JD Vance’s sexy couch having a demure Brat summer, go for it. We’ll all be ghosts soon anyways.

What I’m reading

Media Elites Are the Last People to Ask About the Future of Journalism

The whole exercise is a bit like canvassing the designer of the Hindenburg on the future of air travel. - The Nation

The Original Influencers

Is a cheese pull worth 1,000 words? Los Angeles’s mid-aughts food bloggers thought so. - Eater

Why Celebrities Stopped Being Cool

These days, the world’s biggest pop-cultural icons all want to be “relatable,” no matter how famous they get—but if stars are just like us, what’s the point of having stars? - GQ

America's absurd war on 'organized retail crime'

Despite all the effort spent prosecuting it, there's virtually no concrete evidence that retail theft — organized or otherwise — is on the rise. - Business Insider

Why Does Everyone in Hollywood Have Veneers Now?

Veneers were once a dirty secret. Now they’re the new luxury status symbol, and the famous and wealthy are flocking to Hollywood’s favorite dentist in search of ever more perfect teeth. - GQ

I Took A TikTok Class. What Happened Next Blew My Mind

A 90-day course taught by an influencer claims that anyone can build an audience online. They just needed the tools, which would cost a little more than a thousand dollars. - Defector

More fun stuff

Hugh Hefner's son wants to buy back Playboy.

Amazon is rolling out a new low-cost storefront to rival Temu.

North West gifted her mom Kim Kardashian a Skibidi Toilet diamond necklace.

For God’s sake, please stop hacking the internet archive!

High Snobiety goes deep on 50 years of Hello Kitty.

Chick-fil-A’s new app will feature original animated shows, podcasts, games, e-books, and more.

Why Instagram carousels sometimes start on the second slide (they want you to engage with the post)

Frye boots are finally back.

The Information created this chart showing the disparity between Trump vs Harris’ podcast appearances.

Girls, get her!

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