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If you're looking for a Halloween costume that's affordable, politically-minded yet inoffensive, instantly recognizable, and in serious danger of being no longer topical by the time Halloween rolls around, well, look no further — Yandy's got you covered.
The lingerie brand, purveyor of such tasteful and everlasting classics as Sexy Harry Potter, Sexy Donald Trump, and Sexy Minion has made another winner with the Sexy Fake News costume. Yandy's website implores you to "spread all the alternative facts" in this costume (ew), which really works on subtlety by slapping the word "FAKE" in red and all caps across the boobs of a dress made of various newspaper clippings.
If you've been living under a rock since the election (which...don't blame you) and are seeking to rectify this by going as something more current for Halloween, here's a super quick recap. The phrase "fake news" became popular during the 2016 presidential election when (real) news reports came out about the spread of false news stories propagated by alt-right 4channers, teenagers in Macedonia, and one Jestin Coler, who reportedly made $10,000 to $30,000 a month just thinking up BS. These news stories were often completely ridiculous but sometimes convincing tales about political figures published on sites that looked eerily close to the real thing and subsequently spread on social media. When the news that Donald Trump won the election turned out to be real, lots of people attributed his victory to fake news, and his co-opting of the phrase to retaliate against any negative news story has made the term a mainstay in contemporary political discourse.
In other words, it's a meme.
Because I am not, in fact, making $10,000 to $30,000 a month by writing fake news and am being paid on the hour, I decided to put my student debt-bought journalism school education to good use and see if the newspaper clips used on Yandy's dress were real. Lo and behold, they are (10 points for verisimilitude), but the stories they're using are really old (-20 points for topicality) — the only one that was legible enough to Google is from 2000. So if you're the detail-oriented type, you could totally DIY this shindig by pulling headlines from this past year, but if you just want something that might elicit a chuckle, you can purchase this dress on the website for a cool $54.95. Hopefully it's no longer a thing by next Halloween.
