You’ll Have to Make Your Own Halloween Anne Frank Costume as Stores Start to Pull Them After Complaints
What kid doesn’t want to dress up as Anne Frank for Halloween these days? I can’t imagine it not being perennially among the top costumes for kids of all ages. Well, your kid’s dreams may have been squashed by some spoilsports who consider the costume “disrespectful” and “inappropriately exploiting the horrors of the Holocaust.”
The outrage over this costume appears to have begun with a tweet from a twitter account calling itself “Far Right Watch”, even though I’m pretty sure this story has nothing to do with the far right.
This lead to one enterprising Twitter user to tweet directly at the PR person for funcostumes.com, who replied with a reasonable explanation that it’s not a Halloween costume, it’s a costume meant for people putting on a stage production of The Diary Of Anne Frank, which is an actual thing people do and a pretty good reason to buy or sell an Anne Frank costume.
Nonetheless, the funcostumes.com Twitter account announced it was pulling the costume immediately because of the controversy.
— Halloween Costumes (@funcostumes) October 17, 2017
So if you’re putting on a production of The Diary Of Anne Frank, which is, frankly, extremely likely to be the case if you’re a high school drama teacher, you’ll have to make your own Anne Frank costume.
It seems like every year there’s some controversy about some Halloween costume that has everyone up in arms. I had always assumed that the best way to deal with an offensive Halloween costume was to not wear it, but I suppose nowadays you’re not doing your job as an offended person unless you get someone to, if not attempt suicide, then at least lose their job because of angry tweets.
Like so many social media outrages, this one seems entirely manufactured by people who are looking to be offended. While dressing up as Anne Frank for Halloween would probably be in bad taste, it’s a children’s costume, not a Sexy Anne Frank costume for slutty sorority girls. Any kid who actually wants to dress as Anne Frank for Halloween is doing it because they were inspired by her. And the costume wasn’t made or marketed as a Halloween costume, people do wear costumes for reasons other than Halloween. So maybe consider that before you tweet that a costume company is run by Nazis.
And really, aren’t tasteless costumes what Halloween are all about? Dressing as Marie Antoinette carrying her head or Steve Irwin with a stingray sticking out of his chest might be tasteless, but it’s also harmless. The way I see it, if you want to dress up as a prescription bottle for Quaaludes made out to Bill Cosby or as Frankenweinstein this Halloween, you knock yourself out. And yes I know that technically you’d be Frankenweinstein’s Monster, shut up.
