The Big Apple is the place to bob for Halloween costume inspiration this year.
The hottest new holiday outfits in New York are being ripped from recent Gotham-centric lore and tabloid headlines — as they poke fun at the city that never sleeps.
That includes costumes modeled on real-life MTA ads, the Bed-Stuy Aquarium and counterfeit politicians — including one lifelong Manhattanite who made Mayor Eric Adams’ legal woes this year’s costume.
“Being a New Yorker is like a culture, so to speak. New Yorkers are very proud of where they’re from,” explained Samir Lavingia, 30, who has a history of emulating mayors and once dressed as Bill de Blasio.
“It’s awesome that New York is a big enough place that you can have a costume that’s kind of a meme about your own politics and people will get it.”
The Columbus Circle resident donned a white dress shirt and a baseball cap made to look like the New York Mets and Yankees combo hat Adams wore two weeks earlier — and in the process ignited a cultural firestorm between the feuding fans.
To top off the costume, Lavingia toted around an Istanbul-bound Turkish Airlines ticket — a nod to the mayor’s federal charges over donations from the European nation.
“I just find it fun. I find it fun to be local politics memes for Halloween. And [Adams] is just so meme-able. He’s just everywhere online,” said Lavingia, who had originally planned on wearing a hat with Adams’ catchphrase “Stay focused, no distractions, and grind,” but it, unfortunately, wasn’t delivered in time.
“When I went to Bill de Blasio a few years ago, zero people understood my costume. But I feel like Eric Adams is just more available to normies.”
For Colton Caulfield, finding an NYC-centric costume marked his transformation into a full-fledged city slicker.
With a cell phone in hand, a beanie on his head and slumber in his eyes, the Duchess County transplant might have looked like any other late-night subway passenger, but straphangers immediately knew who he was.
Caulfield was emulating the passenger pictured in the MTA’s “Keep your stuff safe” advertisement, which is plastered inside train cars to remind commuters not to leave their items unattended.
“I take the F every day, and it’s always there and it was one where it was just such a specific look . . . If you’re sitting on the subway and you see that every day it becomes a character,” Caulfield, now of Greenpoint, told The Post.
“It feels like a theatrical kind of ad, to be honest, right? Like, he conveniently has all three things sort of ready to steal. It can be kind of funny to look at.”
To really bring the costume to life, the 24-year-old video editor trudged onto the subway over the weekend and settled into his subject’s sleepy state — garnering an eruption of laughter from the subway car.
“It is kind of like this intimate thing where a select few people — the people that live in New York City — would be able to get it,” Caulfield explained. “It’s niche, but in like, a funny way.”
Other niche costumes like Caulfield’s went viral in the weeks leading up to the spooky holiday, including one man and his dog raked up more than 300,000 TikTok views for mimicking the now-defunct Bed-Stuy Aquarium while walking in the Tompkins Square Park Dog Parade.
Another man boasted 750,000 views on X for his bulky, but incredibly accurate homemade 7-train subway car costume.
Daphne Hansell, 22, and her husband Matt Beard, 25, opted for a costume that proved much more obscure — but used Halloween as an opportunity to air their grievances.
The “Kathy Hocul kills congestion pricing” marked the pair’s first-ever couples costume and saw Hansell, dressed pristinely in a pantsuit, channel the governor as she used a bloody toy knife to stab Beard, who in a car-covered tablecloth pinned with cash, emulated the suspended transit policy.
“We were just spitballing ideas, and we were getting, like, sort of increasingly silly,” Hansell explained.
“I, like a lot of people, was pretty frustrated with the governor’s decision to halt congestion pricing over the summer. We initially thought it was too silly, but our friends kind of talked us into it.”
Understandably, not many people understood the couple’s reference, but that did little to deter Hansell, an NYC native currently living in DC.
“We talked about a couple other ideas, but this one just seemed like the most fun,” she explained.
