About

Fake Spirit Halloween Costumes refers to a series of memes in which people use Photoshop to create parodies of Halloween costume merchandise, similar to Obvious Plant, but specifically targeting Spirit Halloween. Though the trend originated in 2019, it saw a significant spike in usage during the 2022 Spooktober season when people created humorous costumes such as "Tech Tip Man" or "Gay Loser."

Origin

On October 19th, 2019, the Facebook meme page Guy Fieri's Post-Ironic Meme Vault^[1] uploaded a picture of what appeared to be a Guy Fieri costume being sold at a Spirit Halloween, but the image itself was photoshopped to mimic the design of real costume packaging at the retailer. The post went on to get over 10,000 shares and 3,500 comments in three years while also inspiring others to create similar fake costume ideas (shown below).

Spread

The fake costume meme posts, typically being constrained to the Halloween season, didn't see further spread until late 2021 when the New Jersey-themed Twitter account @NewJerseyMemes^[2] helped to revitalize the parody trend on November 2nd, 2021, with three specific Halloween costumes depicting "Benny," "Shoobie" and a "Guy Met at Djais," a popular Jersey Shore hangout location (shown below). The tweet received 80 likes in roughly one year.

During the 2022 Halloween season, fake Spirit Halloween costumes saw a significant spike following multiple different examples being posted on October 19th, 2022. The Twitter account @AzureBiosystems^[3] posted one version comprised of a scientist-themed fake Halloween costume, sporting the included accessory of "shame" and received over 4,200 likes and 600 retweets in five days (shown below, left). That same day, Twitter user @thebrianasman^[4] uploaded a "Twitter Writer" themed parody costume in a bag, complete with Hot Takes and received over 1,500 likes and 300 retweets in a similar timeframe (shown below, right).

Various Examples

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Search Interest

External References