For those people who get the shivers when they see Christmas decorations appear a little earlier each year, this will be disturbing news.
Halloween costumes and decorations already have crept onto some store shelves, reflecting the increasing importance of the scary holiday to retailers’ bottom lines.
All Target stores were fully decorated for Halloween by last Monday, said Susan Eich, spokeswoman for Target’s parent, Dayton Hudson Corp.
The discount chain has a good reason to get a jump on trick-or-treating. Halloween has become Target’s second-biggest holiday season, eclipsing Easter as more adults get into the act, wearing costumes and throwing parties.
Target’s Halloween theme for 1997 is “The Big Boo to Do.” Each store is arrayed with a “pumpkin patch” offering decorative items such as plastic jack-o-lanterns.
Halloween falls on a Friday this year, so retailers are counting on lots of parties being thrown. For those already scouting for costumes, the hottest sellers for adults are expected to be vampires, devils and Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, Target says.
Trendy kids will likely don outfits of Disney’s Hercules, Sesame Street’s Elmo, Batman and Barbie.
As long as they don’t do it before Labor Day.
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Weird or chic: Does outrageous fashion have a place in today’s value-oriented, dressed-down world? It most definitely does, concluded a recent panel organized by the Costume Committee of the Chicago Historical Society and the Fashion Group International of Chicago.
Even if avant garde designs appear to have little commercial purpose because few items ever make it beyond the runway, they spur the industry’s creative processes, said panelist Joan Weinstein, president of Ultimo Ltd. and proprietor of numerous trendy boutiques on Oak Street.
The Historical Society’s 60,000-piece costume collection bears out the wisdom of that big-picture outlook. It includes a gauzy, loose-fitting Paul Poiret gown in salmon silk chiffon that shocked the world back in 1913. “It was a really radical change from the heavily corseted look,” says Susan Samek, director of exhibitions and costume curator.
Another shocker: a 1947 Dior black wool suit with big padded shoulders and peplum. Women in Chicago hated the designer’s “New Look” creations so much, they actually picketed in defiance.
So have a little patience with today’s groundbreakers such as New Wave Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo, urges Weinstein. Kawakubo, who drew raves and hisses with her oddly padded designs that reminded some of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, may not look so odd in a few decades. Anything’s possible.
Strike fallout: The two-week United Parcel Service strike didn’t cripple Lands’ End’s state-of-the-art catalog operation in Dodgeville, Wis., but it was costly.
In its second-quarter filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Lands’ End said it incurred an additional $1.3 million in costs from shipping packages via U.S. Postal Service Priority Mail and for advertising it ran encouraging customers to call.
That’s 2.5 percent of Lands’ End’s $51 million profit in 1996.
Lands’ End suffered more than its East Coast competitor L.L. Bean because it was so reliant on UPS, shipping 95 percent of its packages on Big Brown, said Maxwell Sroge, an Evanston-based catalog consultant.
Sroge says the hit to Lands’ End “is significant, but it won’t sink the ship.” There is some good news: Lands’ End said orders rebounded as soon as the UPS strike was over.