Scoring a totally unique Halloween costume doesn’t mean you have to drop a ton of cash; all you need is some fabric, a little craftiness, and nowhere near enough time! Here are some culturally relevant, creative, and inexpensive costume ideas that you would totally rock on Halloween if you had any sense of follow-through.
A Minion
Jump on the bandwagon with this easy-to-assemble costume consisting of an all-yellow outfit, overalls, and goggles. Whether you ironically or genuinely love minions will not be an issue once you realize that you don’t own any yellow clothes. Where do you even buy goggles, a science store? Do those exist? Give up.
Pizza Rat
Stay on trend with a sexy take on NYC’s most dedicated pizza consumer. All you need is a tight gray outfit, painted-on whiskers, and a flight of stairs. See? Easy as pie. Actually, the pie will be your downfall, because real pizza would get gross and making a realistically proportioned pizza prop would be way too much work. You’re not a professional artist, for crying out loud!
The Peanuts Gang
Going as Charlie Brown and crew is a great way to turn basic, primary-colored clothes into a classic costume. But going alone as Charlie Brown is even sadder than Charlie Brown going as a ghost. Unfortunately, this costume requires you to assemble a cast of at least four willing friends of multiple genders, and your friend group all bought tickets for that fall foliage booze cruise. Damn, it could have been so cute!
A Starbucks Cup
Your friend did this last year so you thought it would be easy, but it turns out the Starbucks logo is, like, really complicated. What is that, a fish-lady? While you’d love to poke fun at the way they always misspell your name by writing it on your costume, it won’t come across if you don’t get the logo just right, and you definitely won’t. Maybe next year!
Cookie
You’d love to channel your favorite Empire character with some fur and leopard print and long nails. But in order for that to happen, you’d have to go to a thrift store, which could take up to 40 minutes and induce an allergy attack. No, thank you! You’ve got too much on your plate. Maybe going as a sheet ghost wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Imperator Furiosa
Dressing like your feminist hero from Mad Max cannot possibly be that hard. All you need is a little dark makeup, a bald cap, a neutral outfit, and some steampunk accessories. Wait—all you need? That’s like four things and one of them has the word “steampunk”! You haven’t fed your cat in two days haha.
Donald Trump
You don’t even have to buy a toupee for this one. All you need to do is print out a picture of his face, tape it to a popsicle stick, and wear a suit. Political and low-risk! It would have been so easy if your color printer hadn’t been broken since 2012 and you hadn’t spilled Mike’s Hard all over your boyfriend’s suit last Halloween. Shame, you’ll have to save your biting political commentary for the next election.
Peggy Olson
You CALLED this Halloween costume when you saw Peggy Olson walking down the hall all hungover and confident with her sunglasses, bold print, box of desk supplies, and cigarette. You’ve had months to get the costume together, so it’s too bad for your more put-together friends that you won’t even get around to printing out the octopus picture she was carrying. But you called it!
Hopefully, you’ll enjoy entertaining these ideas until the morning of October 31st when you resign yourself to going as Rosie the Riveter again. Oh fuck, where did your red bandana go?
