- Spirit Halloween fake costume memes are taking over the internet.
- The company launched its own #SpiritHallowMeme promotion on Saturday, and provided a template for users to make their own.
Spirit Halloween has become a full-fledged #SpiritHallowMeme.
The Halloween costume store sparked a viral meme trend, this time a series of user-generated images of tongue-in-cheek, fake Spirit Halloween-branded costumes.
Seemingly no subject matter or category has been spared, as the meme has satirized iconic television shows like "The Sopranos," YouTube personalities, current events like Kanye West's recent gaffes, and the hoax of impostors pretending to be fired Twitter employees last week.
Several celebrities — including Jimmy Fallon, Ryan Seacrest, Diplo, and the Jonas Brothers — also joined in to spoof themselves, sharing their own joke costumes on social media.
—Jimmy Fallon (@jimmyfallon) October 29, 2022
While the retailer initially seemed hesitant about the growing trend — responding on Twitter to one meme earlier this week that it was "not an officially licensed costume from our company" — it has seemingly embraced the explosion of posts.
"Photoshopping our packages seems to be trending at the moment," said a tweet on the official Spirit Halloween account October 24. "We will be passing this to our review team. Thank you for bringing this to our attention."
But by Saturday the account had tweeted out a blank template to encourage followers to create their own memes, then share them with the hashtag #SpiritHallowMeme, which began trending over the weekend.
Spirit Halloween did not respond to Insider's request to comment, but has continued to share and respond to its favorite posts on Twitter in real-time.
—Spirit Halloween (@SpiritHalloween) October 29, 2022
—Spirit Halloween (@SpiritHalloween) October 26, 2022
The Halloween store already was a popular meme, representing the retail apocalypse in recent years, due to the seasonal retailer's penchant for setting up in empty big-box stores. According to Know Your Meme, the trend began in 2015 when a user included Spirit Halloween in a viral "rundown shopping mall starter pack" post.
It has since been used to parody everything from the decline of the American mall to government stoppages and Facebook outages.
—Spirit Halloween (@SpiritHalloween) October 29, 2022