What Were They Thinking?

A classic! This one was being sold on EBay as belly dance costume (as if!). People try anything to sell and 'belly dance' seems a label they love to put to their items:

Nowhere in the description did this costume indicate it was for Halloween, but I think that "SEXY ARABIAN BELLY DANCER COSTUME" is pretty scary!

This costume was found by the amazing costume detective Karnak Claire!

Costumes like these are not necessairily wrong, there are nice ones around, but what's up with the pattern on the dress?

A dark spooky costume for halloween. It's got eyes and red and green moustacios and an oddly shaped black thing on the tummy....Scarey!

Thanks to anne

Here is so much weirdness going on, I don't know where to start! The layers of square fringe, the fringe overload at the neck, the neck-thingy, the really bad belt and the lame skirt. Oh I forgot, the pharaonic-ness of it....

My friend Anala from bellydanceforums.net made this super cool Halloween costume with wiggly eyes. Imagine how they move with shimmies! There is a story behind this costume, please read :)


"It started something like this: I am sitting at a "Haflaween" a year or so ago, watching performers in their crazy Halloween / bellydance costumes. And something, some piece of music, made me think of putting wiggly eyes on a belt.

Flash forward a year or so, and my brother- and sister -in- law play a joke on my mother- and father- in law while they are out of town. They sneak into the house and put wiggly eyes EVERYWHERE. On the fridge when you open it. On switchplates. On the toilet lid when you lift it. It was hilarious.

And I just *had* to make a costume with them. Had to.

So, step one was figuring out how to attach them. For a while, I had some idea (crazy) about quilting them down under tulle. That wouldn't work -- it would make them hard to see from a distance. So, I thought about some kind of clear plastic, lightweight, but like contact paper that would seal them to the fabric.

You get really strange looks from the clerks at fabric stores describing a problem like that.

But, bless the ladies at Hancock, they have a sense of humor. (Mental note, I owe them a trip with the finished product; I promised after all.)

The clerk there took me to the glue isle and really recommended Fabric Tack. I had Sobo and (something else) already; but, 3 is the charm. So, I took the Fabric Tack home for a glue test.

I had 3 dimensions for success:
1. dries clear
2. ease of application (can I control the squirt?)
3. how well does it hold?

Here are the 3 lined up. The fabric tack was the hands down winner.

Construction . . . and a LOT of fumes . . .were in my future."

You can see many more pictures here on facebook

Anala explained a bit more about the lining, because there is actually a joke in the lining:

"So, The liner fabric has owls on it. Winking owls, to go with the movement on the eyes outside. But, there is another aspect to the joke, if you dig a little. Owls say "hoot" (according to the English rendering), and owls are sometimes called hooters. But, "hooters" also means "boobs" in English slang, and there is a restaurant chain around here called "hooters" with an Owl logo. The restaurant features scantily clad buxom waitresses. So, despite a lifetime of being small busted, I have hooters -- and hooters on my hooters."

The skirt looks so weird, like a monster puking a yellow waterfall: