Superheroes & politicians

With Halloween right around the corner, the choices for altering your appearance to something scary, something sweet, or even something downright ridiculous are, quite simply, endless.

Political candidates, super villains and scandalous vixens are among some of the top choices of costumes this year, according to a few business owners on the island.

“The last couple of years have been unique as clothing and things that they wear. I have anything from leisure suits to the bag lady dress,” said Kathy Dagel, owner of Wrap It Up Alterations, a garment alteration store on Rice Street. “It’s a wide variety of costumes, which is really fun because it gets my creative juices flowing, too.”

This season, Dagel said she has altered around 20 to 30 Halloween costumes.

“I had one lady come in that wanted a quick recyclable costume and she was a little tiny, so I suggested she take a Walmart bag that they have and sew a couple of them together and wear that as a dress,” she said. “It’s been a busy season this year for costumes.”

Jill Lagmay, Kmart soft lines manager, said children’s apparel makes up 75 percent of the Halloween costume sales at the Lihue store.

“Captain America for the young kids and Shopkins and “Frozen” for the girls (sells the most),” she said. “For the adults … we have costumes for couples so they can pair up. The things that won’t sell are your foam costumes like M&Ms, hot dogs, pizzas. They want capes or something they can mix and match to whatever they want to wear.”

Dagel’s daughter, Candie, said last year they made a Day of the Dead costume.

“It’s always fun to see people’s ideas and give people ideas for things that can be fast and simple,” Kathy Dagel said.

This year, Dagel, Candie and Candie’s daughter, Teloa, will dress as fairy tale characters.

“Teloa will be Goldilocks, I’ll be Mama bear and grandma will be Papa bear,” Kathy Dagel said.

Just around the block at Malia Kai Boutique, owners Maryann Ornellas and Jamie Kai have sold out of the popular Harley Quinn getup, a fictional super villain and frequent accomplice of Batman’s nemesis, the Joker.

The character was made popular most recently in the movie “Suicide Squad.” The super villain appears as a young woman with blonde hair, red and blue-dyed pigtails with light-messy clown makeup.

“For Halloween, we pretty much have a lot of accessories,” Ornellas said. “People have been coming in to buy the set or they can put it together, so we have masks, bunny tails, fangs, unicorns.”

She said Halloween is the time of the year when you want to be whatever you want to be.

“You can be as sexy and as ugly or as bad as you want to be,” she said. “Some people come and asked if we had Bill Clinton and Hillary masks or wigs.”

Though the boutique caters mostly to women, Ornellas and Kai have had men shopping for Halloween attire.

“We’ll make sure next year we’ll tap into getting some men costumes,” Ornellas said. “Right now it’s basically women, but I think there’s a need for men, too.”