Like most children in the 1990s, my family’s fancy-dress costumes comprised whatever low-effort ensemble could be fashioned out of a black bin liner or a cardboard box. And so, for Halloween 1989, my dad decided that one of his eight children should go as the Berlin Wall. Communism may have been dead, but Halloween as a cultural reference point was just beginning. And okay, it was 1989, everybody except for a pissed off five-year-old (who had put a LOT of effort into her witchy bin-bag) “got” the significance of the Berlin Wall.

In hindsight, this was a primitive version of “Gay Halloween”, a modern trend that thrives on dressing up as the most obscure cultural reference. Think Molly, the automaton bird that Kelly Clarkson recently tried and failed to buy, or Cynthia Erivo of Wicked’s acrylic nail. The costume is less about being scary (Erivo’s nails are terrifying, mind) and more about how fluent you are in the language of niche cultural allusions. Like memes and reels, costumes are now acts of visual quotation and interpretation, not really made to go to a party so much as shared on the internet.

This year, Martha Stewart missed the memo and decided to dress as a socioeconomic crisis. If many Halloween costumes now thrive on........

© The Irish Times