HalloweenLos Angeles
October is a costume, then it is a night
A seasonal brief for the month ahead. Pattern, not a party listing.
Illustrative desk copy. A composite, not a reported night. No sentence in this piece is a quotation.
By Anthony Perlas
Halloween in this city is the one weekend when nightlife and film wardrobe admit they share a closet. That admission is useful. The rest of the year they pretend the closet is a coincidence. In late October the coincidence is the assignment: who is in costume because the calendar said so, and who is in costume because they are always slightly in costume and the calendar has finally caught up.
A costume that survives the flash is the same problem as any other garment, with worse incentives. The incentive is to be legible from across a room for one night only. Legibility is not the same as construction. A reference that needs a caption in person was already losing. The costumes that stay interesting are the ones that still function as clothes when the reference gets tired: you can walk, you can sit, you are not asking a stranger to hold the prop that makes the joke true.
Los Angeles adds a second confusion. A person in severe makeup on a Hollywood sidewalk may be going to a room, or coming from a set, or living between the two without feeling a need to clarify. The seeker’s mistake is to decide too fast which picture they are in. Ask what the shoes are for. Shoes tell you whether the night includes a street or only a mark.
This brief does not list parties. A listing is a fact, and this edition does not have confirmed public bills it is willing to print as a calendar. If a room wants to be named in October, it can send the date, the address, the age line, and a way to check it. The desk does not cover underage nights. A costume is not a permission structure.
What the month is good for, if you are trying to see rather than to attend everything, is the moment a costume fails or holds. Failure is information. The joke that only worked in the mirror meets a room that has already heard it. Holding is also information: a shape that still looks chosen at one in the morning, when everyone is tired of performing recognition. That is the same test as any other Saturday. October just prints the test in louder ink.
Treat the above as a composite brief, filed before the holiday, not as a report from a party that has not happened. No one is quoted. When October is over, the desk can say what actually lasted. Not before.