It’s the one time a year where Cinematic Dressing isn’t frowned upon!

I must be the worst Halloween person of all time. As a menswear guy with a lot of clothes (and gets fitted everyday), its hard for me to “waste” a day of fits, After all, the most festive (or at least, silly and fun) costumes tend to require purchasing things that you seldom get to use again; I’ll probably never have use for a polyester avocado onesie and I hardly have the skill to cut and sew proper cosplay. I still want to participate, but in a way that I can fully get behind!

That’s why it just makes more sense (and perhaps more fun) to look into my own closet and see what I can find. That’s why my previous Halloween costumes are pretty menswear friendly. They include Forrest Bondurant (a 1920s bootlegger), Roger Radcliffe (a sweatervest wearing composer),the Crane Brothers, and as a no brainer,Wes Anderson characters like Max Fischer and Zeffirelli. Not only is it easy for me to do these characters, but they’re all quirky enough that its just a tad different and costume-y than my everyday attire.

Lazy isn’t the word I’d use to describe this. I think it’s a fun exercise to look into your closet and see what you can put together that’s in service of a “higher theme”, the theme being a specific character. This process of looking to something existing as a guide can seem disparate from my typical outfit creation process (where you’re making “new” combinations), but I’m pretty aware of my inspirations at this point: I’m honestly cosplaying Apparel Arts illustrations or old Drake’s 2017 lookbooks on the daily. We’re all just Disneybounding archetypes!

Speaking of Disneybounding, I definitely leaned into it for my approach for this year’s Halloween festivities. For those of you who don’t know, Disneybounding is the term coined by Disney adults enthusiasts who want to dress as a character but without going full costume (or furry). For example, Mickey Mouse could be done by wearing a black shirt and red shorts and Ariel could be approximated with a purple tank top and green pants (for her clamshell bikini and fish tail). Since most Disney characters aren’t exactly fashion people (many are animals), it relies a lot on color combinations which can be seen as a cop-out (though most Disneybounders aren’t fashion people anyway). That’s what makes it a fun challenge to do in the Menswear Way.

Plus it’s a healthy break from simply wearing variations of vintage or trad and say “I’m Insert Niche Movie Character Here”.

So if you can’t already tell in the above photo, I dressed up as Fozzie Bear this year! Isabel really wanted to be Kermit (she had just seen The Muppets 2011 for the first time) and suggested we do something Muppet related. I didn’t have anything pink at all (or a blonde wig) but what I did have was a lot of brown (and a brown fedora), so Fozzie was a no brainer. We obviously didn’t want to cop out by wearing onesies or just masks with color block clothing, so we applied our Disneybounding knowledge to make it more interesting.

I know that Fozzie is more of an orange-brown bear, but I think I did my best by wearing various shades of brown: dark chocolate pants came from my DB suit and the shirt is a rayon sportshirt that has become my recent favorite. You’ll recognize the brown Wellema fedora, which I folded to have an upturned brim in order to approximate Fozzie’s small porkpie hat. The real iconic move was the jaunty scarf/bow with a pink geometric print; Isabel made it out an old bedsheet so we didn’t have to source fabrics! We also decided to do a pink nose with makeup to emphasize my Muppet-ness. The result is a very 1940s hepcat/jazz pianist take on Fozzie which I honestly love. I later reused this idea for a separate Halloween thing but changed it up by wearing a full brown cord suit and western shirt; I ended up tying the bow higher to give it more of a western feel.

Isabel clearly knocked it out of the park as well with her Bookcore-ish take on Kermit. It’s all green, but again it’s more than just wearing one solid piece. She has tights, a casual cotton dress, and lovely ribbed roll neck, all of which she will definitely wear again (her favorite color is green); I like the “indie” touch of cream socks and mary janes. The crowning jewel is Kermits neck…thing, which she made out of an old blanket; like my nose and scarf, this was absolutely needed to cement her costume as decidedly Kermit. Isabel also wears a beret that has a frog embroidered on the top as well as some green eye shadow.

Mixing wearable clothes with both pop culture and vintage/fashion references is what makes Halloween fun!

Now enjoy a few photos from our Hallo-weekend. I never have much in the way of Halloween plans this year (our friends still do some lowkey stuff), but it was nice being able to dress up a little and hang out with our pals. Spencer’s party was probably the biggest thing we went to, which brought a bunch of familiar faces wearing some fun costumes!

And if you’re wondering who Spencer is, I can happily answer that for you: he’s Warren Beatty in the Parallax view who rocks a mullet along with an N-1 deck jacket and jeans. Classic Spencer move.

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Always a pleasure,

Ethan M. Wong

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