Within 24 hours of Taylor Swift’s wonder look at a Kansas City soccer recreation in September, Ashlee Hartley and her husband, Charlie Tighe, started accumulating fabrics for their Halloween costumes.
A crimson jacket. A blond wig. A bottle of blue Gatorade.
Ms. Hartley, 31, and Mr. Tighe, 35, who are living in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., hand-painted a white jacket and denims to resemble the denim set worn by means of Travis Kelce, a decent finish for the Kansas City Chiefs who’s rumored to be courting Ms. Swift.
Ms. Hartley expects Halloween events to be filled with doppelgängers of the couple. “I think it would be so hilarious to see 10 Taylor Swifts and 10 Travis Kelces in a room,” she stated.
At the peak of Barbiemania this summer season, it seemed that Barbie and Ken will be the dominant {couples}’ dress of Halloween. This week, SAG-AFTRA discouraged its members from dressing up as characters from main film studios in harmony with the ongoing actors’ strike.
And now an October wonder will have arrived within the shape of Ms. Swift and Mr. Kelce. Social media is dotted with {couples} posing in crimson No. 87 jerseys and sequined leotards greater than per week earlier than Halloween.
“Thank you, Travis and Taylor, for giving boring straight white couples a 2nd Halloween costume,” Lucas Johnson wrote on X, previously Twitter. (Ms. Hartley stated she thinks any couple may just pull off the glance.)
Small on-line shops say that requests for the costumes — with supply by means of Oct. 31 — are surging.
“I’m up until 3 or 4 in the morning every night, customizing bodysuits,” stated Angela George, 40, who lives in Portland, Ore., and sells clothing on Etsy. Already this month, she stated, she has offered greater than 300 items impressed by means of Ms. Swift, a number of to shoppers who stated they meant to put on them for {couples}’ Halloween dress contests.
Enthusiasm isn’t at all times so sturdy for {couples}’ costumes, which an editorial in The New York Daily News as soon as proclaimed “the worst part of Halloween.”
But Ms. Swift and Mr. Kelce have vast attraction, and handy timing, running of their want. The pairing represents a second of alignment between two of the rustic’s “biggest media entertainment entities,” Nora Princiotti, a soccer author for The Ringer, instructed The New York Times in an editorial previous in October.
Many Swifties have leftover apparel from dressing as much as see the Eras Tour or its fresh live performance movie, Ms. Hartley stated. And reddish soccer jerseys aren’t precisely laborious to return by means of. “It attracts sports people, it attracts non-sports people, it attracts Taylor Swift fans,” Ms. Hartley stated.
Even Mr. Kelce has discovered the N.F.L.’s prime-time protection of the couple to be a little bit overkill. But the pair’s publicity used to be a plus for Richelle Terry, 31, an fundamental college instructor in Houston who used to be having a look for a recognizable dress.
Each 12 months she and her husband get dressed up as whichever superstar couple “is the happening hashtag at that moment,” she stated. Last 12 months her husband, Chase Terry, 37, shaved his head to be the Travis Barker to her Kourtney Kardashian. This 12 months, he grew a mustache to awaken a unique Travis.
Halloween costumes have advanced from a typical inventory of characters (witches, ghosts) to seems that mirror the zeitgeist. Costumes in line with TV presentations, comedian books and films took off in the second one part of the 20 th century, thank you partly to dress corporations that authorized characters like Spider-Man and Snow White.
Some customers now need costumes that make references to social media tendencies from the weeks main as much as Halloween. And as a result of such seems are much less more likely to be to be had at huge shops like Spirit Halloween and Party City, some smaller dealers have sensed a chance.
Stormy Kelly, 33, who lives in Miami, sells made-to-order costumes in line with celebrities like Ms. Swift and Kylie Jenner thru TikTok and Instagram. “I can see a paparazzi photo and have the sample made by the next morning,” she stated. Her most complex costumes can value as much as $2,000, however maximum promote for $200 to $300.
About part of her gross sales because the Eras Tour started in March were impressed by means of Taylor Swift. “I’ve ditched the $50 bikinis I used to sell because these projects are so much more profitable,” she stated.
When Kayla Highley, 29, who lives in Fishers, Ind., added a crimson jersey that claims “Taylor’s Boyfriend” at the again to her Etsy shop in September, it temporarily changed into her top-selling merchandise. She stated she had gotten about 15 inquiries prior to now week asking if orders may well be delivered earlier than Halloween.
Ms. Swift and Mr. Kelce have also made appearances in Halloween décor. In one setup that was widely shared on TikTok, a skeleton dressed in a Kelce jersey proposes to a skeleton in a blond wig. The scene takes position within the entrance backyard of a space, the place the skeletons are surrounded by means of gravestones with the names of Ms. Swift’s exes.