Okay, this year is your year! You’re determined to take home the prize for the most creative Halloween costume this year, and you don’t care who gets hurt in the process! (Sorry, seasonal humor!) Let’s ponder a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing for ways to make this year’s costume one for the ages!
My best strategy for winning a Halloween costume contest is to be overtly original. If you buy your costume off the rack either online or off, you’re pretty much doomed to failure. If they’ve seen it, they’ve seen it! Originality is everything here, and you can’t afford to be like the crowd if you want to win the contest!
My favorite way to win is to come up with someone famous who is in the news recently, probably not for their charitable work either! Capitalizing on their misfortune is – well it’s exactly what you want to do here! Chances are, they did it to themselves, and we as fans owe it to them to keep them on the public’s radar! Some ideas of just how this would work could include for instance, Lindsay Lohan looking for a fix; Paris Hilton in jail house garb, (fully accessorized, of course!); Michael Vick hauling his dead dog behind him (fake, of course); or perhaps the Obama girl.
The key here is to make sure you can be recognized as who or what you’re trying to portray. If they have to figure you out, you’re dead before you’ve begun. So that begs the question, “What if I don’t look anything like the person I’m lampooning!?!” Well, then either the costume itself has to carry you or you need to do a bang-up job with makeup and hair. Not only that, but you need to be sold out to the idea of portraying this person. That means acting like they would act, talking like they would talk, and in general becoming that person for the duration of the party. (Or at least until the judging is done!)
Make sure you fit into this costume concept. If you’re trying to portray Will Smith when your body more closely resembles Norbit, then we’ve got a problem from the get-go! Also, if your costume has you exposed more than you might be normally, make sure you can live with this. If you’re going to dress up as Britney Spears and are uncomfortable showing the amount of everything she shows, then rethink your costume! If you look the least bit uncomfortable either in concept or execution, people will notice.
If you are going as a couple, just be sure and not do what everyone else has done before. Originality wins, particularly in couples contests.
Make sure you have some fun! That’s the bottom line here in all of this. If you come up with a great costume but aren’t enjoying both the process and the contest, then what’s the point?
