Halloween is over and Spirit Halloween couldn’t be more thankful. Photoshopped memes of the brand’s costumes have found their place across social media for the last few weeks leading up to the spooky holiday, which they were not too pleased with.
The seasonal store is known for having an effect on social media. October 2022 saw the trend of fake Halloween costumes branded with the Spirit Halloween logo. The meme took off as many joined in on the generic-yet-oddly-specific formula for the prepackaged Halloween costumes. Even some celebrities got involved in the trend, posting versions of themselves as Halloween characters.
The problem arose from the popularity of some fake costumes including the words “gay,” “lesbian” and “bisexual” in the description. Many were confused about whether or not Spirit Halloween actually sold the getups, which caused the brand many headaches.
In one instance, a Twitter user believed that a phoney “Gay Guy” costume they’d spotted online was real, looking for an explanation from the company. The meme shows a smiling man with a rainbow pride flag draped over his shoulders.
Spirit Halloween had to craft a response, writing: “This is not an officially licensed costume from our company. Photoshopping our packages seems to be trending at the moment. We will be passing this to our review team. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”
It’s unclear as to if the company considered filing cease-and-desist notices for the meme-makers or if they were filing copyright claims in order to have the posts taken down. Now that the spooky holiday has passed, it’s most likely that everyone will finally move on.
Source: https://twitter.com/EdwinBJr/status/1584201762268844033