A full month before Halloween, surfing the Internet for wigs, noting the endless supply of Michael Jackson numbers, I wondered who would pay $39.95 to look like Billy Mays or $29.95 to shake acrylic polyester Farrah Fawcett locks. Ed McMahon costumes seemed to be in high demand, along with various incarnations of Heath Ledger — from his own likeness to his now legendary interpretation of The Joker.
It seemed then that Halloween was about two things: dead celebrities and “dead presidents.”
Market analysts predicted a holiday spending slump earlier this month, including an 18 percent drop predicted by the National Retail Federation. According to economic experts, Americans weren’t going to drop their Jacksons and Franklins — the $5.7 billion they spent last year — on Halloween 2009. In short, the industry was spooked.
Instead, consumers would get a little more creative, make their costumes at home or — to corporate horror — wear what they bought last year.
In a CNNMoney article, NRF president Tracy Mullin tried to put a positive spin on the economic reality retailers are staring down each day.
“The economy has caught up to Halloween this year,” Mullin said. “Since retailers know that Americans will be looking to celebrate on a budget, there’s no doubt we will see creative costumes and decorating ideas in every price point possible.”
It was the sort of spin quotation we’ve come to expect from corporate mouths, where “the economy” is used almost as a pronoun, or better still, a demonized boogeyman out to ruin our lives.
In the tricky world of business communications during a frightening recession, language is a double-edged sword. A spokesperson must create distance between the corporate roles that led to the recession, while also creating the sort of economic faith that will lead consumers to part with their cash.
As a rhetoric nerd, I find this communications strategy captivating, mostly because Americans don’t much notice it. The boogey man is always an entity “out there,” like “the economy,” and golly, companies and consumers are its victims.
But you know, there are other views to consider. Maybe the recession is putting us in touch with a part of ourselves we forgot, and perhaps corporate America needs to think more about how to foster and support creativity in its various forms. There might not be as much profit in it as the inflated reports suggested just a few years ago, but it was profitable enough to build companies like JCPenney and Sears, Watkins and a host of others that have been in business for a hundred or so years.
Believe it or not, just 35 years ago, a store-bought costume was considered “the cheap way out.” Children went door-to-door in costumes they or their parents had made. I know my own mother spent hours and hours bent over a sewing machine making the Raggedy Ann, Batgirl, and Wonder Woman costumes I wore as a child.
Fabric companies, particularly textile manufacturers in the U.S. that were devastated years later by globalization, made a decent profit. Sewing patterns, like those sold under brand names like Simplicity, Butterick and McCall’s were a big deal.
I remember going to the fabric store with my mother, sitting in front of large pattern catalogs and watching her search for outfits she could make. Sewing then wasn’t a hobby so much as an economic advantage. If one wanted durable costumes and sturdy everyday clothing, one made them at home.
Store-bought costumes then, and into the 1980s, were flimsy acetate structures with plastic masks. They were uncomfortable, poorly made and flammable. But then, so were most pajamas and nightgowns manufactured in the 1970s. Oh, how we loved our plastics and polyesters!
But something happened between the mid-1980s and our current recession, something that created a distance between our physical selves and the things we use and buy. Companies sent sewing work overseas, lowering the price of clothing in general and costumes specifically. American textile companies folded. Entire towns lost their lifeblood as vampire costumes manufactured in Taiwan and China gained in popularity.
Looking back, it seems the lure of cost and a sense of saving oneself the time it would take to make a costume or outfit, won out over our own, perhaps unrecognized, need to be creative. I was thinking about this transition in American attitudes while at a crowded party on Halloween, noting how exuberant people were about the costumes they had made and how few of those costumes were pre-packaged and store-bought.
When writer and scholar Azar Nafisi was on campus as an E.N. Thompson Forum speaker at the Lied Center in 2006, she commented on the lack of imagination in classrooms and suggested the key to our building a better world was the support and expression of creativity within our national and international cultures.
I thought about her call to reclaim imagination as I watched my colleagues and friends enjoy Halloween festivities. There were many homemade costumes, and conversations were far more celebratory than cerebral — a mighty triumph when a bunch of graduate students get together. We were all frugal in our expenditures, but our costumes and the foods we ate were mostly prepared at home. We made punch. We kept it simple, but more importantly, we kept our festivities close to our own creativity.
I think of this as quality spending in a quantity-driven market. For example, for the first time in more than a decade, I put together a costume and went to a party. I bought a wig and fake tattoo sleeves from a regular store, but found other items at the Goodwill and at home. The Halloween industry got $22 from me in 2009 that it didn’t get in 2008 despite “the economy” because this year, I wanted to spend time with people I enjoy.
And as I stood within a throng of Halloween revelry, I wondered if the key to recovering from “market correction” and recession could rest in a concerted effort to foster and support creativity. I wondered, too, if we had grown tired of not knowing where our food and everyday items come from, if globalism leaves us unmoored, lost to each other.
I wondered if Americans were, by focusing on friends and family, telling corporations and Wall Street they need to get with the game plan — that we’re tired of the disconnection they bill as profits.
Ooh, now there’s a scary thought.
Erica F. Rogers is a fourth-year doctoral English major. Reach her at ericarogers@dailynebraskan.com.
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