Last-Minute Halloween Costumes for the Climate Conscious

This one is both pretty easy AND topical, given last week’s release of Midnights, Swift’s latest studio album. Taylor’s multiple iconic eras of music means there’s lots of ideas for how to dress like her that can easily be shopped in your own closet (or the closest closet of any feminine-presenting person you know). Once you’ve got your “1989”-era red lipstick on or your “Speak Now” boots and prom dress procured, all that’s left is to figure out how to represent a jet. Lots of options here, from easy (printing out a photo of a private jet) to premade (carrying a toy plane) to ambitious (assembling a wearable cardboard airplane) to downright lazy (fold a paper airplane!). If you want another accessory, bring along a rolly suitcase—and make sure you memorize the carbon emissions from Taylor’s jet trips (8,293.54 tonnes of carbon from 170 trips in the first half of this year, more than 165 times what the average American household emits each year).

Sigh, the soup. You knew we’d have to mention it sometime. Regardless of your feelings on the Just Stop Oil protesters who threw tomato soup on the Van Gogh painting in London earlier this month, there’s no denying the visuals are compelling—and can make a very topical costume for this Halloween.

Images of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are widely available online for printing or to use as a reference for your own large-scale painting (ambitious folks could even order clothes based on the painting), and cans of tomato soup are available at your grocery store. This can easily morph into a couple’s costume, if you get someone to hold the can wearing a JUST STOP OIL shirt and mime throwing the soup at your frame.

In tandem with the Soup Protests, we’ve got our next suggestion: go as the embodiment of Andreas Malm’s badass manifesto on the virtues of escalating climate protest tactics. There’s less visual splash to work with than the previous suggestion, but a lot more rhetoric to work with. (You could probably technically make any of these costumes sexy—we just think this Malm’s book is the sexiest.)

If you’ve got a plain red top and are a fan of DIY, the book’s cover could be a great inspiration. Making some barbed wire and letters for the book’s title with some printer paper could be a fun way to spend a cozy fall afternoon before you head out to Trick-or-Treat (if you live near an oil and gas project, we won’t ask where you’re going after all the candy is gone).

Or, you know, just wear a red bikini and carry a piece of pipe around and engage your autumnal crush in a conversation about the merits of symbolic protest versus actual property destruction. That works too!

This is a true last-minute costume, and could be pretty easy: any shiny, dark clothes you have on hand could work to depict the devastating ecological damage done by oil spills. If you’re in a pinch, a couple garbage bags with holes cut out of the top could represent an oil slick nicely. If you want to get really literal, you could pour vegetable oil on a black shirt and wear the stain proudly. Print out some Big Oil logos to stick on your garment of choice and you’re good to go.

I need to admit that this is the only costume on this list that I’ve seen beta-tested in real life, and I’m happy to report that it works well. Pictured above is a friend of mine in Halloween of 2019, who found an ocean-colored gown at a thrift store and covered it in trash to represent the exponentially-increasing chunk of ocean garbage that was, as of 2018, roughly twice the size of Texas. You don’t, of course, need the shimmering prom dress, as long as you’ve got a bunch of plastic to work with and something to attach it to — go nuts!

Does this exist? Who’s to say. This is a great outfit if you’re planning to Irish goodbye from a Halloween party early. I’d dress all in green, glue a Bitcoin logo to your front, talk a lot of nonsense about how one of the world’s most pointless energy sucks can actually be a part of the solution, and then disappear as soon as anyone questions what you’re saying.

Okay, one more sexy idea—it is Halloween, after all. If you caught Earther’s fan favorite slide show last year about weirdly sexy wind energy stock photos (shout out to Muscular Shirtless Wind Guy, our favorite kind of Wind Guy) you know that renewable energy is great fodder for sexy visuals. Get a little creative here with your choices. Make a solar panel out of some tin foil and pin it to a hat; wear a slinky dress underneath. Wrap some cables from the hardware store around your body and go as a heat pump, one of the sexiest of climate solutions. Or just walk around shirtless with a pinwheel, like our good sexy friend up there. Go nuts!

Couple’s costume alert! Do you have a Patagonia vest and some khakis lying around? Does your significant other have a suit and a bad attitude?? You can go as one of the hottest political conflicts brewing right now: the Republican war over pretty harmless ESG investing tactics. Let everyone at your Halloween party hear the Republican senator scream about “woke capitalism” while the hapless investor just tries to explain the benefits of carbon markets. It’ll be a fun time for everyone, we promise!