Eight years ago, when personal upset was making me wallow, I left all my Halloween shopping to the last minute. By the time I got to the £1 shop, all that I could get my hands on were a bunch of straggly witches’ wigs. Call it the excess of free time I had as a student, call it genuine creativity born of a wish to just do things after spending two days duvet-clad, I had an idea. Some fake blood, staples, a handbag and some garish gold ‘jewellery’ from a charity shop later, and I had my outfit. I was going to be Amy Winehouse! Whether it was similar facial features – people tell me I remind them of her, sometimes, when they are VERY drunk – or the fact her look was so iconic, it worked: with a wig, short denim shorts, ballet pumps, liquid-eyeliner tattoos and a tank top, it was obvious who I was. To the point where people on the street were drunkenly shouting ‘Amy! Amy!’ at me. One man even asked ‘Can I rape you, Amy!’, but that’s a separate matter.
In retrospect, it was incredibly tasteless. She wasn’t well, the photos I’d taken my inspiration from – the ones with her, catatonic, stumbling around north London with Blake Fielder-Civil after an argument-bender-catastrophe – were a cry for help. Although it was not fully known to me at the time – we see so many tragic women in the public eye, can we always tell who’s having the real breakdown? – the ‘scariness’ I was channelling was a legitimate fear that so many people around her had at the time. In a way, though, I have to just put it down to youthful oversight. Yes, I’d painted blood down my legs, but I also took care and attention making that wig perfect so I could look like her, because part of me really wanted to be a lot like her. I looked up to her so very much, and maybe I thought I’d never have to feel guilt for dressing like her, because I deified her to the point I’d convinced myself she was invincible. And, for what it’s worth, I always enjoyed dressing as trendier celebrities with big hair and drug problems – going as Russell Brand the year before.
But, right now, as people across the UK don outfits for Halloween, where do we draw the line on bad taste?
While it’s pretty much clear to everyone now that dressing up in blackface is reprehensible – and just fucking stupid, do you really want to get boot polish all over your clothes? - cultural appropriation is going to be about a lot tomorrow, whether we like it or not. But maybe this can be the beginning of the end. Companies that use white models and white bodies to sell their products have, in the past few years, bought up bindis and braids, repackaging them then selling onto white women in the same way that Aztec and African prints have been co-opted in fabrics. And so, while it’s become pervasive for entire cultures to be reduced to throwaway emblems with little thought of where those emblems have come from, Halloween comes with its own problems.
Because now, entire cultures are whittled down to shortcuts to ‘scariness’, or attire worn simply to fulfill that ‘sexy’ brief that has become somehow umbilically attached to the yearly tradition of dressing up. I’d argue that, for some men, the scariest thing for a woman to do is look sexy – it can be properly intimidating – but that there are a zillion ways to look sexy or scary without borrowing from another culture as if it’s just a kooky cool look that white people have deemed cool after years of ignoring/taking the piss out of.
And then there’s the matter of not just going as the generic ‘Native American’ or ‘Ratchet Ho’ but properly putting effort into dressing up as specific scary people, like, say, a child killer.
I spoke to Samantha, who dressed as serial killer Rose West a few years back: ‘I’ve never been a fan of sexy’ween. The need to slut-up and go out in your undies with a dribble of blood painted sexily at the corner of your mouth seems weirder than going out as an actual psycho.’
‘So I went as something truly horrendous and terrifying. It doesn’t get much worse than an actual child killer. I wasn’t naïve in my choice. Growing up in the 90s I ended up obsessed with the Wests’ story and read pretty much every news story I could on them. It fascinated and horrified me that human beings could be so evil.’
The problem was when she turned up to the party: ‘It was a Tim Burton party, I was properly out of place…people asked me why I would come as something so horrible. I just told them that Halloween is all about things that are supposed to scare the living shit out of you. Rose West does that.’
Looking back on it, Samantha might not be so quick to dress up as, say, Reeva Steenkamp: ‘Last year one of the most popular dress-up ideas most of my friends had was Oscar Pistorius. Some even went with their girlfriend who was holding a fake bathroom door.’
‘But, now, I absolutely think there is a limit on how bad taste you can be. It shouldn’t be about the victims. Especially kids. I was once at a party many years ago and two girls came as murdered schoolgirls Jessica and Holly. That was too far.’
Part of this is because of the accountability dress-up now carries; remember those two girls who dressed up as the Twin Towers and ended up going viral and getting death threats? Yeah, sucky thing to dress as, but ‘It’s also much harder to get away with being bad taste. Once your photo gets put on Instagram, anyone and their dog can take a shot at you, and these photos can pop up on Facebook whenever some random from school ‘likes’ them.
'If my outfit made someone cry or feel sad, then I’d have a think about it, but right now, I want to dress scary.'
But part of it seems to be about whether you’re punching up or punching down. Amy Redmond is co-founder of Sink the Pink, a gender-bending drag show that holds dress-up (or just wear absolutely nothing at all) nights all year long: ‘When it’s Halloween, it’s like everyone else is taking a day-trip to what we’re living!’
On top of that, they throw a Bad Taste ball each March. Amy tells The Debrief: ‘Without sounding like a dick, you’re in a safe space at Sink the Pink. It’s all very camp and tongue-in-cheek and playful.’
‘While uni lads would throw on a shellsuit and dress like Jimmy Savile, people at Sink the Pink would put a twist on it, so a dead Jimmy Savile or something, so the joke was on them, or, well, Jimmy Savile.’
While she’s dressing as Madonna this Halloween, she once dressed as the Pope for the Bad Taste Ball: ‘I got a Pope outfit right after he abdicated and I got it covered in pen like it was his last day at school, and I covered it in some pretty slanderous things, like “I loved it when you bent me over the altar.”’
While this is slanderous – Amy has never met a Pope, nor have her friends – the joke is punching up, picking apart the coverups of child sexual abuse the Catholic Church has since admitted to since Benedict XVI’s abdication.
As for perhaps the UK’s most high-profile and controversial bad taste outfit, when a then-21-year-old Prince Harry wore a Nazi suit to a bad taste party, Amy says: ‘Well, he was just a kid then. But there is just no thought to dressing up like a Nazi. It’s just a bit boring, like what are you telling me? What am I getting from this?’
‘From looking at photos from Sink the Pink, sure, there’s a guy in a burka with the bum cut out, but he’s holding these Louis Vuitton and Selfridges bags and has a ‘my husband doesn’t know I’m a fella’ sign on his top – it’s a comment on the rich Arabic men who go shopping in west London with their wives but still pop up on Grindr. There’s so much thought that’s gone into it, and that’s what makes me feel proud.’
In seven years of Sink the Pink, Amy has received just one complaint in the form of a blog post about someone dressing in ‘whiteface’ – or Geisha dressing. This is a form of cultural appropriation, the blog claims. She tells The Debrief: ‘I’d be very welcome to have a conversation with that person about it, but I think that once you come into us and you understand what we’re about, there’s nothing to be offended by us, it’s about celebrating life and dressing up.’
The moral of the story? Dress up as whoever this Halloween, but if you’re going to be rude, you’d better be bloody smart about it.
**Like this? You may also be interested in: **
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Follow Sophie on Twitter: @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.