It has been about a year since you published your blog about the chicken costume, and I have been extremely busy. I have been participating in the Chicken Costume Project at the South Street Seaport. It’s here that I came to realize something: The chicken costume is not only a great Halloween costume; it is also a fantastic accessory for any occasion.
For example, after learning that authentic chicken costumes are handmade, I decided to become an art student and a seamstress. After learning that one must first sew the shirt and then affix the head, I decided to become a fashion designer. And after learning that one must follow detailed instructions for sewing on the chest piece, I resolved to start my own clothing line.
When shopping around for supplies, I learned of two possibilities: (1) There is an enormous variety of chicken costumes in different sizes and styles; or (2) There is only one chicken costume. Naturally, I chose option number two.
This blog is written by a professional costume maker. The goal of the blog is to encourage people to spend money on a chicken costume and use it, not as an opportunity to bash other costumes. This blog was started in 2007 and has been updated semi-regularly since then.
The original Chicken Costume was created in 2005 by a newbie blogger named Aaron. Aaron wanted to create a costume for his girlfriend’s birthday using the old chicken suit from the movie “A Christmas Story”. He took some sort of chicken suit he had laying around, added feathers and made her a hat, gloves and boots. She loved it and so did everyone else who saw it!
As this was happening other bloggers started making up their own versions of the costume. One of these was from a woman in West Virginia who did something similar (she used a white jumpsuit with ties for the neck and feet). Others used white sheets or painted their bodies green and put on baby blue or purple gloves. In 2005 I decided I wanted to make a costume of my own but was unsure how I would do it…and then one day Aaron emailed me saying he thought maybe we could make our own costumes together! We started working together on the project and soon realized that we knew more than we thought we
The chicken costume is a way of saying: “I am the person you should spend your life with.” (It’s a joke. No, not really, but I’m not going to explain my joke.) The idea is that there is no better decision to make than to marry someone who dresses as a chicken for half the year. The chicken costume says it all, and it says it in such a way that everyone can understand, because everyone is familiar with the chicken costume.
The chicken costume is one of those things that makes sense in many different ways and can be interpreted with equal sincerity by people on both sides of the debate.
The chicken costume is a line of clothing for chickens and other small animals, created by the costume designer Carrie Dunning, who was also responsible for the movie costumes for the comedy The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005).
The costumes are designed to allow a real chicken to be worn in public but also to prevent it from being eaten. The costume comprises a fake chicken head with a beak, two pink wings attached to the shoulders and an oversized tail.
The idea behind the costume was first suggested by Ms. Dunning’s mother when she was dressing her pet chickens at home. “I thought people would really enjoy seeing a chicken on an airplane,” she said.
For a long time, the most popular costume at the costume party was the chicken. A dragon or a komodo dragon was a good second—if you were very brave and carried a sword in your teeth. But the chicken costume was an old standby, and it was one we had made for ourselves.
It’s no accident that it’s not scary—the chicken is a cartoon from the fifties, designed by someone with very little concern for what children might think if they saw him walking around in public.
A chubby, dark-furred, clucking bird with its head tucked under its feathers and one eye peeking out behind its wing? That wouldn’t have been too scary for children in the fifties, but it looks like something out of a horror movie now.
But that’s okay: horror movies are fun when you’re nine years old. You don’t want to see them when you’re forty-nine.
I was in a chicken costume on the street in Los Angeles and no one noticed. (I’m serious.) I had the feathers from an actual chicken, which I wore for about two hours. My hands were covered with paint and my mouth was covered with blood. I was walking down the sidewalk in front of a Trader Joe’s, and people just walked right past me. I thought it would be funny if someone actually noticed that there was a chicken running around pretending to be human, so I put my hands up like a chicken. And no one even blinked.”
Name:Boring Office Oscillation
If you’ve been paying attention to what’s been happening in the US, it’s hard not to feel a sense of deja vu. The economy is growing; unemployment is falling; the stock market is soaring; and everyone keeps saying things are getting better. Well, yes and no. Better than they were? Yes. At least as well as they could have been? No.