After my 2019 Freddie Mercury / Freddy Kreuger mashup costume went viral, I started thinking about other potential combinations for a future split get-up. It felt like enough time had passed at this point to do the concept again, and since I never repeat the same thing twice I told myself that it had to be different enough or I’d just go with something else. Lo and behold, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce became a huge thing at the start of the NFL season and were essentially the hottest story of the year, so the idea of this crossed my mind pretty early on. I knew there would be a ton of couples costumes featuring the pair, but a split of them? Probably not, especially given the complexity of it and the fact that split costumes aren’t really a common thing (…at least not yet!). It came down to this or Barbenheimer, and at the end of the day my gut went with #Tayvis.
Once this idea was the front-runner, I started researching all the parts that I needed for it. For Taylor I must’ve looked at 30-40 different outfits of hers, but I ultimately decided to go with her signature white slogan tee with short glitter shorts, two layers of tights, and the black fedora. She tends to wear black Louboutins to complete this look and I wasn’t going to go *that* far, but fortunately my wife found similarly looking mens platform shoes on a different site and I went with that instead. I also needed a wig of course, and I would need to later get a fair amount of makeup done on the right side of my face. A microphone topped off the look on her side. For Travis, I needed a Chiefs helmet, his jersey (I chose red because it contrasted Taylor’s white tee better), football pants, a red sock and a cleat. I topped off the look with an arm band, a yellow receivers’ glove and a football. Later on, I found that foam roller tape proved to be very useful in keeping the helmet and fedora in place.
The trickiest part of this costume definitely revolved around the helmet – including cutting half of it vertically, affixing it to the fedora and then stabilizing it on my head so that it stayed upright. I had never cut this sort of object before, so I enlisted the help of a handyman who fortunately turned out to do a stellar job! First he sawed the crown of the helmet in half while I held it steady for him, and then he finished the job with an electric drill on the metal grill on the front. My wife then cut Taylor’s fedora and carefully tucked it inside of the helmet, and then velcroed them together so that I could wear them as one. This took some trial and error given their weight differences, and we had to eventually offset this with foam roller tape. We then had to do a fair amount of cutting on fabric – first on the football pants so that the right leg didn’t show on Taylor’s side, and then on the black shorts so that *those* wouldn’t show on Travis’ side. We also needed to make 6″ slits on Taylor’s tee shirt (front and back) so that it could essentially hang down on one side and tuck into the other (football) side. And finally, we had to cut Travis’ jersey in half, leaving the “KEL” part of his name visible on the back. With all the cuts in place, the last major step was velcroing the jersey to Taylor’s t-shirt down the front and the back, and then adding bits and pieces of velcro to the shorts to keep those in place on the crotch. With the major logistical parts down, I then needed to shave half of my face, my right arm and my right leg, and then I had to carefully slip into two pairs of tights – first a sheer one and then a fishnet to mimic what Taylor does. I went to Nordstrom to get the makeup done – which included contouring, mascara, a fake eyelash lipstick and some blush – and they did a fantastic job in only 45 minutes time. Shoutout to Maria for doing that on two separate occasions. Lastly, we had to add the wig, which I ended up cutting on the left side so that it wouldn’t show at all under Travis’ helmet. All I needed to do was add the accessories at that point, including the two different sets of shoes, glove, red sock, arm band, microphone and football.
We put a lot of work into this one but we’re glad that we did because it was a hit! I tested it out on the Saturday night before Halloween and got some good reactions there, and then on the actual holiday I went to the NYC parade (an annual tradition of mine) where it received a lot of fanfare from both the crowd and other marchers. It’s always great to get that sort of reception with these costumes, but many people also told me that it was the best costume they had seen all year and that really made my night. Everybody understood the costume right away since it was such a hot pop culture duo, and they also appreciated the uniqueness of it. I think I had close to 500 pictures taken of me in total all night, and I was also interviewed by two separate content creators who I randomly bumped into along the way. I ended the night at the Webster Hell afterparty, where I entered their infamous Costume Contest to a nice cheer from the crowd.
Overall, a very fun experience!
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My All-Natural Bob Ross Costume 
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Last-Minute Halloween Couple Costume: Bob Ross and his Happy Little Tree 
Bob Ross and His Happy Trees Couple Costume
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