Copyright Westword
On Colfax in Lakewood, a bit west of Kipling Street, families out for their annual Halloween costume shopping ritual may find their eyes drawn to either or both of two signs on the north and south sides of the street. The sign on the north side of Colfax is on a box truck and bears the logo of Spirit Halloween, the omnipresent pop-up costume shop that reanimates itself yearly in vacant big-box stores like the ghost of capitalism seeking physical form for two months a year. This specific Spirit Halloween lies inside a Big Lots corpse next to a Dollar Tree adjoining a Lowe’s in the Westland Town Center, tucked back a bit from Colfax — hence the box truck billboard — but directly south, on the other side of Colfax, lies another similar sign. “Spirit Halloween: Billion Dollar Cororation [sic]” it reads in a similar typeface to the box truck’s. Underneath: “Disguises Costumes: Family owned year-round local small business!” Disguises LLC is an O.G. in the metro’s costuming scene, open since 1999 with 16,000 square feet of disguises, costumes, makeup and accessories. Theater companies can rent an entire production’s suite of costumes here; Disguises has its own in-house sewing and laundering facilities and its staff creates new costumes daily. It’s a beloved institution, known to have anything one could need to disappear completely into another physical form. So beloved, in fact, that a local makeup artist wrote to Westword to complain about Spirit Halloween’s incursion into Disguises’ territory at Colfax and Miller. “Spirit has opened their annual pop up directly across the street from Disguises for a second year. In the world of tariffs and multi-million dollar companies swallowing small businesses, this could be interesting,” they wrote. This warranted a brief investigation on Sunday. Spirit Halloween was as Spirit Halloween is: a grid of racks with hordes of rectangular plastic-wrapped and overpriced polyester costumes like Dr. Greenweed (you too can prescribe marijuana!), SNL‘s “Dick in a Box” (box provided) and spicy Fallen Angel and Space Cowgirl getups. Most goods for sale are Spirit-branded — the company, owned by Spencer Gifts, is keeping its profits in-house. The selection spans from South Park to Beetlejuice to Bikini Bottom, but it’s also thick with the sorts of outfits being donned by protestors in Portland: giant frogs and bananas. While Spirit’s incarnation in the former Big Lots is a bit cold and soulless, the minute you enter the foyer of Disguises across the street, you know you’ve landed in a sophisticated costumer’s emporium. A glass case with a sign reading “Professor Disguises’ Curio Case of Time Travel Mysteries & Oddities” holds shelves of historic-looking firearms, flint-locks and derringers and holsters out of time. Past the inner doors at the curio case, you enter a labyrinth of spectacle and imagination, loaded with far more whimsy and nuance than its corporate competitor across the street. It’s a more sophisticated costume shop, and particularly excels in makeup and accessories — the selection of bald-head caps alone was overwhelming. Thinking of dressing as Diddy this year and shopping for an orange prison jumpsuit? Disguises can offer you selections at $27, $40, or $54 — the $40 version includes handcuffs. We can’t argue that Spirit Halloween doesn’t have a place in our crumbling capitalist society — its foreign-made, occasionally clever au courant costumes have become an American icon already, for better and worse. But it’s an affront to our community pride and appreciation for neighborly excellence for Spirit Halloween to plant its flag across from an institution like Disguises.
