Halloween is a multi-million-pound industry fueled by candy and costumes. Though you could spend every year dressed as a sheet ghost or a sexy cat (no judgment here), the disposable fancy dress industry would rather you wouldn’t. For, they would rather sell you a new shiny and highly flammable outfit each October. To do this, they latch on to whatever phenomena are making headlines at that moment in time be it Pizza Rat or pregnant Beyoncé or in this year’s case ludicrous denim.
If each year can be defined by one overwhelming trend, then 2017 will surely be remembered as the year of the ridiculous jeans. We’ve had Topshop try and sell us transparent trews, Nordstrom flog $425pre-muddied denim, and one designer at Tokyo Fashion Week introduce us to the concept of thong jeans.
Now, of all the bizarre denim trends of 2017, it is the last one, the thong jeans, that have really captured the public’s attention. It garnered headlines like, ‘Ever wondered when ripped jeans become too ripped? Wonder no more’ from Glamour, and ‘Thong Jeans Now Exist So Let’s Officially Get The Apocalypse Rolling’, from Harper’s Bazaar.
So, it’s no wonder that with Halloween less than a week away one costumier, Yandy, has acted fast and transformed them into one pricey costume. For $60 they are selling, ‘a nude bodysuit with long sleeves, a high neckline, a sheer bodice with a geometric design, an open back panel, a cheeky cut back and tattered blue jeans with a thong cut back, open legs and ankle cuffs’.
While we love the free sweets and the excuse to dress up the throw-away industry of tokenistic costumes leaves something to be desired. It’s been calculated that the average American buyer spends around £32.81 per year on an outfit, which means about £2.1billion is spent per year in the US on disposable clothes). In a world where waste is a global climate problem, do we really need a thong jean costume?
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.