Fashion Zombies

What do you plan to wear to the apocalypse? A zombie is a fictional undead being created through the reanimation of a human corpse — rare in life, common in fashion, where zombie costumes, T-shirts and even a hit song keep the undead permanently in style.

How Zombies Became Fashionable

The film Night of the Living Dead made no spoken reference to its undead antagonists as zombies — they were described as ghouls, and George Romero used the word ghoul in his scripts. In later interviews he used the term zombie, and the word is used exclusively in his 1978 script for the sequel Dawn of the Dead, including once in dialogue. Dawn of the Dead is possibly one of the most compelling and entertaining zombie films ever made — and the film that made zombies fashionable.

Michael Jackson should also be thanked: if Romero made zombies fashionable, Jackson gave them style. The Thriller imagery — the red jacket, the choreographed undead — turned the zombie into a look that could be worn, danced and copied, which is the definition of fashion influence.

The Fashion Zombie and Zombie Style

A fashion zombie, in the playful sense, is a person who creeps and crawls around looking for fashion sales — hungry as any other zombie, but for discounts. Shoppers planning zombie fashion will find plenty of costumes online, and zombie T-shirts are rather interesting in their own right, including the Zombies Don't Like Fast Food design pictured on this page.

The 100 years of Halloween costumes video linked here shows where zombie dressing sits in costume history, and the costume stores directory covers the retail side. Before the dead return to life, be sure to fill your wardrobe with clothing and other supplies.

Fashion Zombies, the Song

Fashion Zombies! is a song by the American band The Aquabats and the leading single from their fourth studio album Charge!!, released on Nitro Records in 2005. Lyrically it satirises social fads and popular fashion — in particular the goth and emo subcultures — likening people who adhere to such scenes to zombies.

In the documentary on the album's anniversary DVD, singer Christian Jacobs explained the song as the band's reaction to the newest trend in what he called fashion rock — popular music that was merely a soundtrack to the clothes you wear. The fashion music and fashion lyrics summaries linked from this page cover the wider meeting of songs and style.

Zombie Dressing, Done Well

Zombie fashion has its own craft rules, visible in every good Halloween crowd. The base garment matters more than the gore: a zombie in a recognisable outfit — the prom dress, the office suit, the football kit — reads instantly. Distressing should follow a story: wear at the knees and cuffs, damage where the fictional event would have caused it, rather than uniform shredding. The Thriller tradition adds the other lesson: zombie dressing is social, done in groups whose matching decay is funnier and more striking than any solo effort. Dress the part properly, and remember the fashion zombie's one obligation — the hunt for sales must never be so committed that it frightens the other shoppers.

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