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Celeb Halloween Costumes That Sparked Major Controversy

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Six A-listers found out the hard way that a Halloween costume can outlive the party by years.

Every October, somebody famous picks a costume that seems clever at the sketch-pad stage and turns into a press-release apology by November 1. Nicki Swift’s breakdown runs through six of the biggest offenders — actors, models and a pop star’s kid sister among them — whose “fun” get-ups turned into cultural firestorms. Some of these costumes are a decade old and people still bring them up.

• Julianne Hough wore dark face makeup, knotted hair and prison scrubs to portray Uzo Aduba’s “Crazy Eyes” character from Orange Is the New Black at a Beverly Hills party in October 2013, then issued a public apology.
• Heidi Klum painted herself blue, added extra arms and wore a skirt of severed hands and a necklace of severed heads to play the Hindu goddess Kali at her 2008 Halloween party, drawing condemnation from Hindu statesman Rajan Zed.
• Hilary Duff and then-boyfriend Jason Walsh dressed as a pilgrim and a Native American chief couple’s costume in 2016, while Chris Brown and his friends dressed as armed terrorists back in 2012.

Julianne Hough’s Blackface Moment

Hough’s 2013 costume checked every box for a viral backlash before viral backlashes were even the norm: dark face makeup, a prison jumpsuit and the signature knotted hairstyle Uzo Aduba wore as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren on Orange Is the New Black. The look was meant as homage to one of the show’s breakout characters. Instead, photos from the Beverly Hills party spread fast, with critics calling it blackface, and Hough apologized within days, saying she never intended to cause offense.

Dark face makeup, prison scrubs, and knotted hair — the costume that turned Julianne Hough’s Halloween party entrance into a public apology by the next morning.

Heidi Klum’s Kali Costume and the Hindu Backlash

Klum’s annual Halloween bash has always been a showcase for elaborate, often gruesome, prosthetics, but her 2008 look crossed a different line. She arrived painted head-to-toe in blue, with multiple arms, a skirt made to look like severed hands and a necklace of severed heads — an exact, gory depiction of the Hindu goddess Kali. Hindu organizations and leaders, including Indo-American statesman Rajan Zed, criticized the supermodel for turning a sacred deity into a costume and a photo opportunity, arguing that revered religious figures shouldn’t be reduced to party props.

Hilary Duff, Jason Walsh, and Chris Brown’s Terrorist Costume

Duff found herself in similar territory in 2016 when she and boyfriend Jason Walsh showed up as a pilgrim and a Native American chief for a couple’s costume, a combination critics said flattened Indigenous culture into a punchline for Thanksgiving-adjacent dress-up. Four years earlier, Chris Brown drew his own round of outrage for a 2012 costume in which he and his friends dressed as armed terrorists — a choice many called tasteless regardless of intent. Both cases followed the same script that’s played out again and again in Hollywood: costume goes up on social media, backlash builds within hours, statement follows.

Repeat Offenders: Colton Haynes and Kylie Jenner

Some stars ended up on this list more than once. Colton Haynes drew criticism for using dark makeup and prosthetics to transform into Kanye West in 2011 and Mahatma Gandhi in 2012, both costumes relying on altering his skin tone and facial features to mimic real public figures. Kylie Jenner, meanwhile, has been called out repeatedly over the years for costumes accused of cultural appropriation, a pattern that’s put her in the same conversation as the other names on this list almost every October. It’s the kind of recurring controversy Nicki Swift has tracked across other controversial celeb moments that just won’t fade from the timeline.

None of these six ever seemed to see the backlash coming, which is the actual through-line here — Hough thought she was honoring a favorite TV character, Klum thought she was doing her usual over-the-top party reveal, and Duff thought a couples costume was harmless. By the time each apology went out, the photos had already been screenshotted a few million times.