Reid Beels

I stopped by the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade earlier this evening and caught these amazing pumpkin-headed puppets before the crowds got so thick that I couldn’t see anything. At school, the Halloween celebration came early with a costume contest sponsored by the Communication Design department. A pair of students with wheeled hands and feet, representing “The Spirit of the G Train” (the notoriously-late subway that runs near campus), won the grand prize.

The design department’s sponsorship of this event got me thinking about just how much a well-conceived costume can communicate. While many are archetypes of the season (zombies, witches, etc) or distinct fictional characters, I find costumes that are based on more abstract concepts or on unexpected physical objects to be the most interesting.

Outside of the holiday, a living representation of an idea can sometimes be the most effective way to communicate, yet designers are often hesitant to move away from the ‘flat’ world in which they work. Only rarely, in select advertising campaigns and theme parks do we see companies taking their brands off the page and into the real world. While I’m not saying that costumes are necessarily the best way to solve most problems, they are often overlooked.

For more conceptual (and incredibly witty) costume ideas, I’d recommend taking a look at Jane Asher’s Fancy Dress (especially the later pages).