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WTH, Costuming Department?

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And then there's the Bat-Ass...
"Ugh, two different plaids? I'm a naked robot and even I know that's a fashion no-no!"

So you're watching a movie, and, hey, maybe it's pretty good. The writing is snappy, the actors really seem to have settled into their roles, and all in all it's shaping up to be an enjoyable experience. And then the hero walks in wearing a gorilla suit, a Fu Manchu moustache, and high heels.

And the thing is, it's not for the sake of a joke. The costuming department thought — mistakenly! — that this combination would make the character look badass, and somehow managed to persuade the director. No, they're not being sarcastic, comical or parodic (at least not at the time): it's an entire team of costume designers being totally, completely 100% damn serious about it. The audience, however, remains unconvinced.

That is the essence of "What the Hell, Costuming Department?" Maybe it's an adaptation of another work where the costumers decided, for no apparent reason, to make the character look entirely unlike he or she does in the source material. Maybe it's an original work where the costumers were evidently insane. Either way, confusion and dismay ensue.

Related tropes include: Rummage Sale Reject (where the characters at least have the excuse that maybe they got dressed in the dark), Costume Porn (which provides a possible explanation for some examples), Fashion-Victim Villain (a bad guy whose costumes attract WTH moments) and Questionable Casting (where the confusion arises over who's in the costumes). Specific to video games is Rainbow Pimp Gear, where the best combination of items for gameplay purposes results in a visual eyesore.

Compare Impossibly Tacky Clothes and I Was Quite a Fashion Victim, which is when characters within the work treat the costumes as bad, and Costume Backlash when it's the actor themselves who hates their look.

When it comes to inserting Real Life and/or Sports examples, avoid Complaining About Shows You Don't Like!


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • In Black Butler, Sebastian Michaelis' demon form is never fully seen, but it is supposedly incredibly frightening and very mindscrewy in the effect it can have on the person who sees it... the parts of his demon form that we have seen to date include long black fingernails, some kind of leathery arm and hand covers and Combat Stilettos. Some may call it sexy, but frightening...?
  • Fairy Tail get hits with this a few times with all the costume changes the characters go through.
    • After two good Edolas outfits, Natsu abandons his jacket near the end of the Edolas arc to reveal...a Blue Shirt with Yellow X's that looks wildly out of place with the rest of his outfit.
    • With Erza's variety of armor it not surprising she's got a few instances. Her Nakagami Armor has a Cleavage Window so enormous it looks like she's one wrong move away from a Wardrobe Malfunction. The Giant Armor's color scheme makes her look like a giant bumblebee.
    • Jose Porla's first outfit with batwings and a long drooping pointed hat can cause a few giggles. His second outfit with its military theme looks much better.
    • Gray's Grand Magic Games outfit with exposed shoulders, detactacted sleeves held on by belts, and baggy Hakama pants looks ridiculous and nothing like anything else he's worn. Thankfully he looks better once he inevitably loses the top.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure had always had some strange fashion styles, but Part 5 and 6 probably take the cake. Almost all of the characters have a revealing outfit to some extent, but the real kicker is Fugo. He wears a suit with holes all over it, and only wears a strawberry themed tie underneath. And if Word of God is to be believed, he wears a thong to make it seem like he's not wearing any underwear at all.
    Jello: JoJo characters dress on the cutting edge of fashion. Which is to say the clothing has been all chopped up with a straight razor. Like this poor boy (Fugo) who is dressed as a cheese. But do not weep for Cheese Boy, they replace his clothes with kicking him out of the series.
  • In My Hero Academia, Mineta/Grape Juice definitely has this going on with his costume. His power gives him rubbery purple spheres that grow from his head, leading to his code name, and his costume consists of a purple body suit and mask with a bright yellow cape, boots, and gloves (the latter two both being about three sizes too large) and a metal hemisphere around his waist that's apparently supposed to be a bowl but instead makes him look like he's wearing an armored diaper.
    • Also Todoroki's Boring, but Practical hero costume, to a lesser degree. It was very bland and all-white, with his entire left side encased in ice to cover the fire Quirk he inherited from his dad. It has garnered such reactions from some audiences feeling like it was too plain. But this all changes when his second improved costume comes into the picture, which is way better looking and more well-received than the first.

    Comic Books 

  • The 1990s spared no one in comics. Not even gods. Yes, that's Thor.
    • Hercules got it pretty bad as well - circa 1992-93, he shaved his beard, grew his hair long, and ditched his traditional shorts/skirt and straps for long pants and giant shoulder pads that looked like Cable's cast-offs. He later dropped the shoulder pads for an Avengers tank-top, but that just made him look more like some guy who was on TV by then.
    • The 1990s were quite bad for style when it came to hair. Beast Boy and Nightwing with mullets. And those are considered iconic.
    • Artemis's most iconic '90s costume included bands of large sharp spikes around her thighs, and some other questionable choices. How awkwardly she would have had to walk to keep from tearing deep gouges in her inner thighs with every step was never addressed.
    • In the Teen Titans animated series, New Teen Titans, a short has the Titans being tossed through time, donning costumes and looks from each era. In the '90s era, Beast Boy laughs at Robin's mullet (as he was wearing Tim Drake's Robin costume with Dick Grayson's Nightwing mullet) before noticing his own. When they get to the '80s, Starfire sees what she's wearing and promptly freaks out, using her hair to cover herself up.
  • Speaking of Starfire, this was the consensus on her new outfit in Red Hood and the Outlaws, which managed to take her costume, already one of the most notoriously Stripperific outfits in comics, up a notch since she now effectively had only a pair of pasties covering her nipples, and the bikini she wears late in the first issue actually manages to be more modest than her default costume (and it could have been worse, since before it got an Executive Veto said bikini was supposed to be transparent). When it was announced she would be getting a Lighter and Softer solo series with a new costume that's something of a halfway between her animated and comic versions it was received much more positively.
  • Superman:
    • The assorted attempts to design Kryptonian formal garb, especially from the Byrne era, have caused more than a few snickers. Most of them tend to either Parodied in All-Star Superman, where "Kryptonian formalwear" apparently consists of wearing your underwear outside your pants. Either that, or Bar-El was screwing with Jimmy Olsen's head. (Leo Quintum's borrowed outfit is just as silly, but not in the same way, something he's grateful for — it's actually the outfit of obscure Kryptonian hero and occasional Jimmy Olsen alter-ego Flamebird.)
    • The New 52 redesign of Superman got a lot of this. This was apparently because of Author Appeal from Jim Lee, who has commented on finding the traditional Superman design boring to draw, so he added his own embelishments and a busy armored suit is the result. The most common critique was that it attempted to go for an "armored bodysuit" look which was in vogue at the time, but on top of looking needlessly fiddly and being harder to draw, it had many people wondering why Superman, of all characters, would need to wear body armor. It also threw off the colour balance of the Superman look, with the reds now being vastly overshadowed by the blues, and making him look somewhat scrawny under many artists. The costume was eventually changed when the pre-Flashpoint Superman took over for the New 52 Superman, however...
    • The first Rebirth costume also had this result. While the trunks were still absent and threw off the colour balance, Superman's boots were now also blue, which made things even worse. The consolation was a different belt to break up some blue and no armour lines or random collar like the New 52 suit had. This may have been deliberate, to sell the idea that his Superman was the Superman Blue to the New 52 Superman's Superman Red. When the two fused, the result was Superman's classic outfit sans trunks, with a sci-fi belt to break up the blue (and later down the line, the original suit was brought back in its entirety).
    • Supergirl's New 52 outfit got some scorn for the odd design choices, notably the cut-out knees on the high boots, the strange red patch on the crotch (that seems separate from the rest of the outfit, like... a crotch flap) that almost evokes the image of panties but just looks off, and the general armoured look that, like Superman's costume, doesn't really make much sense. Although some fans liked the armoured and distinctive look of the costume, Kara reverted to her traditional suit at the beginning of Supergirl (Rebirth).
    • During her mini-series, the Matrix Supergirl dons this strange spike-laden ensemble when she goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against Lex Luthor. This was strangely reminiscent of some of the Doppelgangers from Marvel's The Infinity War.
    • Power Girl has had several particularly hideous costumes, as shown here. The one fourth from the right deserves special mention for having way too much going on at once and making the usual Cleavage Window look downright tame in comparison, and as one blogger wrote, making her look like "an X-Men reject from the 1990s."
    • Vartox. Not too surprising, since he's an Expy of Zed from Zardoz (see Film below). This gets thoroughly mocked when he shows up in the Power Girl series.
  • Doom Patrol: Steve "Mento" Dayton has undergone a lifelong struggle to find a costume thatisn't ridiculous. It's possibly justified as he is mentally unbalanced at best, and use of the helmet doesn't really help matters.
  • Star Wars: Some of the clothing Luke Skywalker's worn in Star Wars (Marvel 1977) and other contemporary works is... amazing. Like what he wore in The Return of Ben Kenobi. Then there's the absurdly tight outfit that is honestly referred to as a miner's uniform in Splinter of the Mind's Eye.
  • ElfQuest: In the fandom, the outfits of Rayek and Mender are not the most popular.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): There was one story, during the comic's Audience-Alienating Era, that gave Rotor and Bunnie some cringeworthy outfits when they went to school. Rotor's seen wearing what is easily stereotypical "rapper" clothes and Bunnie donning a sleeveless blouse and Daisy Dukes. A kid's comic!
  • Nightwing:
    • Deathwing, Nightwing's evil future self, managed to assemble a truly laughable costume. It would have been an uphill battle making an Evil Costume Switch out of Dick Grayson's infamously camp "Discowing" outfit, but the end result was, well, look at it. Spikes of Villainy, thigh-high boots, a big flared collar, and an enormous Cleavage Window, complete with visible pierced nipples.
    • Another alternate reality Dick had a costume problem — the Dick Grayson of the pre-Crisis Earth-2. His first costume was this little number, which was essentially Batman's normal uniform, but with a red circle with the Robin 'R' with bat wings and a yellow scalloped cape with a scalloped collar. Thankfully, his second costume looked a lot better.
  • Max Ride: First Flight: For some reason, Ari – the head Eraser - is shown wearing what appears to be a red buttoned up dress.
  • These little numbers from DC's first Star Trek: The Next Generation comics.
  • Almost everyone in the main New 52 Justice League of America line-up had this going in DC You, with only Cyborg being spared. All of these changes were thankfully undone for DC Rebirth:
    • Batman (Jim Gordon, not Bruce Wayne) had a suit of Powered Armor that more resembled a bunny than a bat. And since his identity was kept secret in solicitations, and fans needed a nickname for him (e.g, Azbats for Azrael Batman, Dickbats for Dick Grayson Batman), people resorted to calling him Batbunny. Thankfully, he wore a more traditional Batman suit underneath. The bunny resemblance was also mocked in-universe.
    • Superman decided having extremely short hair would be nice, along with wearing a t-shirt and jeans in an attempt to emulate his Golden Age look (he actually already did this once in the New 52).
    • Wonder Woman was given a more conservative outfit with sleeves and leggings, which had the unfortunate effect of making her look like a trick-or-treater wearing street clothes under a Halloween costume. She also was given wrist-mounted blades for some reason, with fans likening them to the ones sported by Baraka.
    • Green Lantern (Hal Jordan) looked like an entirely new character, with long flowing hair, a green hood and power glove.
    • The Flash (Barry Allen). While many didn't like the busy line-work on his previous costume, this time, it was even busier, with the lines being much more prominent and distracting. At the same time, he had streaks of dark red on parts of his costume, making it look like he literally just smeared random red paint on himself. His eyes, which have always been visible through his costume, now had some kind of lens over them, making this more resemble a costume Wally West would wear. And his symbol was changed to more closely resemble the TV show's, which funnily enough changed to more resemble the comic's in its second season.
    • And of course, there's Aquaman. In a seeming attempt to have the same tone as the costume Jason Momoa wears in the movies, Arthur had a barbarian theme going on. His previous gold armor was replaced with brown plating. His symbol on his belt was much larger, so his green pants now looked like a penis. His trident was even made to look Darker and Edgier and instead looked like someone pulled the thing out of the forge too soon. The new suit was done away with after just one story arc.
  • The Flash:
    • Barry Allen's New 52 suit, specifically the line work. While everyone admits it looks cool when he's actually running, a lot of people just thought it was way too busy for normal scenes. His Rebirth suit is basically this suit, but toned the line work way, way down.
    • Jesse Quick has not had a good time of it.
      • People generally liked her first two outfits (leather jacket and Zettai Ryouiki), but her third was... ugly, to say the least. It was a red leotard that had a 'Q' on it, with the 'Q' weirdly circling one of her breasts, and being composed of a white circle and lightning bolt. Her goggles were now ugly sunglasses, and she wore these really ugly yellow boots that seemed to prove that you can't do Zettai Ryouiki with yellow boots and nothing to break them up.
      • Her fourth Jesse Quick outfit, while generally seen as better than the previous, is also this. It's basically just a read shirt with her Jesse Quick symbol on it and yellow shorts, gloves and boots. A lot of people derided it for looking like she was going to do the dishes.
    • Eobard Thawne's New 52 suit, which is basically Barry's DC You suit, but worse because of off colours and "extreme" additions, like the busy black lightning and weird take on his symbol.
  • Wonder Man: Wonder Man is generally considered to have had some of the worst costumes in the Marvel Universe, with his first two generally being considered the worst. Proving that even Jack Kirby can have an off day, his original outfit consisted of a sleeveless green body suit with a large red 'W' on his upper chest and swirling infinity symbols adorning his lower body. He wore a red belt, wristbands and boots. A green cowl covered all of his head except his face, combined with a bright red visor. However, this was surpassed by his second costume, which is generally regarded as one of the worst superhero outfits of all time. The basic green of his body suit remained, but with red sleeves and leggings. His boots swapped to green, with gold trimming to the top of the boots, his wristbands and his belt. An extremely large 'W' and 'M' rested atop each other in a stylized design edged out in gold on his chest. His cowl now also had a gold stripe down the center, while the red goggles remained. Perhaps it's no wonder that his most fondly remembered outfit is essentially just civilian clothes with a red leather jacket and sunglasses.
  • Batgirl: From Heroes in Crisis to DC Infinite Frontier, Barbara Gordon swapped out her popular purple practical "Burnside" costume for a boring gray and yellow ensemble that included what appeared to be a domino mask with tiny bat-ears that popped up from her hair. Coming off of the more popular "Burnside" costume, it was seen as a major step back for the character with the mask being the major mocking point.
  • X-Men: In one of Kitty Pryde's earliest appearances in Uncanny X-Men, it's Played for Laughs, as Kitty, sick of wearing the generic X-costume, decided to throw together what to a 13-1/2 year old girl of 1980 probably thought looked cool, but to everyone else it was... well... just see for yourself. It's notable in that Professor X for the first, and possibly last time, has to order an X-Man to go and change before being allowed to come on a mission.

    Fan Works 
  • My Immortal gives Voldemort high heels in one scene. These only appear once and are never mentioned again. That's just one example; the whole thing is filled to the brim with fashion failure to round out its general Stylistic Suck.
  • Try reading a lengthy outfit description (and there are many) in Becoming Female without wanting to poke your eyes out while visualizing it. An example from the first chapter:
    "I was wearing a cream-colored blouse with bright purple polka-dots, a fleece jacket with pink and red horizontal stripes and an olive green mini. I was wearing lavender flip-flops with lime green tube socks over my mustard yellow tights. I also had on a bra and panties, but they were under the rest of my clothes so you couldn't see them. I had dyed my hair blue and put it in buns like Princess Leia from Star Wars."
  • Erased Potential: Aizawa reacts this way to the Canonical costumes, seeing them as emphasizing 'marketability' over function. He's especially disgusted by what was designed for Yaoyorozu. This is blamed upon U.A. branching out and working with other suppliers; when Aizawa contacts their original supplier, they share his horror, and help salvage what they can while completely redesigning other outfits.

    Films — Animation 
  • My Little Pony: Equestria Girls:
    • Opinions on the human outfits in Equestria Girls in general aside, there's been some controversy about putting the two tomboys of the group Rainbow Dash and Applejack in skirts. Applejack arguably gets a pass since presumably being set at a high school we won't be seeing her on the farm much and Rainbow Dash has always been a Tomboy with a Girly Streak and she at least is wearing shorts longer than the skirt, but it's still odd seeing them in skirts for lots of fans. Applejack's skirt actually gets shortened intentionally by Rarity in the scene where they dress for the school dance. With the new redesigns, Rainbow gets to trade out her skirt for a pair of sweatpants. Applejack still has a skirt, though.
    • Similarly, the designs of the princess characters who were given a lot of makeup and large lips to make them appear older than the students. Celestia and Luna look okay since their colors don't contrast, but Princess Cadance's design has way too many colors that contrast way too much and make her look like a gaudy bimbo who was shot in the face by Homer Simpson's Make-Up Gun. Fan-made show-accurate artwork of Celestia and Luna, and especially Cadance are a massive improvement.
    • Much later when Daring Do's Equestria Girls counterpart rolled up to the party, pretty much everyone called out in unison "Why is the Indiana Jones/Lara Croft monster-fighting adventurer slathered in make-up?" Fans were quick to do a make-up free version which looks worlds better. Ultimately, the special featuring her aired and revealed why this was the case In-Universe — it's not the real Daring Do, it's a diva actress playing her for a movie. The actual Daring Do made a cameo on a book cover later on, revealing that — just like her pony counterpart — she was actually a Palette Swap of Rainbow Dash, lack of makeup and all.
    • And then there's Applejack from "Make Up Shake Up". It's practically a given that she was meant to look absolutely garish, but she ended up looking way too much like a prostitute to land in anyone's comfort circle. Fans wasted no time pointing this out.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Spider-Man:
    • Spider-Man gives Spider-Man a very comic-accurate supersuit that looks like it costs as much as a Lexus without ever explaining where Peter got it, while also making Spider-Man look like an action figure. The Amazing Spider-Man tried rectifying these issues, as noted below.
    • The same movie turned the Green Goblin into something that makes him look like an action figure than a comic-book supervillain. Granted, the comic-accurate look probably wouldn't have translated well, but neither did the final result. Fortunately, Spider-Man: No Way Home fixed this issue, by giving the Goblin a visual makeover.
    • The Amazing Spider-Man gives Spider-Man muted, dark-colored suit, complete with yellow lenses. While the look is justified In-Universe and was probably done to differentiate it from the Spider-Man Trilogy outfit, the end result was not very pretty. The sequel updated the costume, which was much better received and was also used when the character showed up in Spider-Man: No Way Home. The Lizard's look was also not very well received, looking less like The Lizard from the comics and more like the lovechild of the Abomination and a 90's live-action Goomba. When he too shows up in No Way Home, his appearance is also updated to look more like his comic book counterpart.
    • The Amazing Spider-Man 2 has its take on the Green Goblin, which is a man with really bad teeth who looks perpetually dirty, with hair akin to a Troll doll. Instead of looking properly menacing, half the time he looks like he just has terrible hygiene.
  • Ah, The Apple! Where to start with that one? Perhaps with Dandi's Buck Rogers-as-porn-star performance outfit, or the golden banana hammock he wears in Hell (Don't ask!) or Boogalow's purple velour jackets with the huge lapels, or Bibi's studded leather and bad eye make-up, or any and everything worn by Shakes... Suffice it to say, this is one ass-ugly movie.
  • The Eye Creatures has a drifter wearing a floor-length sweater nightgown, with Freddy stripes on the front. And several of the titular Eye Creatures wearing nothing but black clothes and sneakers.
  • Batman & Robin features superhero suits with nipples sculpted into the chest pieces, which received quite a bit of ribbing from viewers and critics. George Clooney was more concerned with the sculpted butts and enormous codpieces that the suits also featured, but these got barely any reaction.
  • Beauty and the Beast (2017) is drenched in lavish Costume Porn, but there are major missteps.
    • The Prince's getup in the newly dramatized Prologue is for a Masquerade Ball, and he's described as decadent — but thanks in part to his makeup he looks like The Joker cosplaying Jareth in that movie's ballroom scene.
    • Finally, the film gets to Belle's Iconic Outfit from the animated original: The golden ballgown so faithfully recreated by generations of cosplayers, Disney Theme Parks, Disney Princess merchandise and live-media adaptations. And it's been redesigned (with the help of her actress, Emma Watson) to look like, as Uproxx's Donna Dickens put it, "a deflated balloon", or a modern teenager's prom dress. Yay?
  • In the words of Jay Pinkerton, the Catwoman film "boldly [reinterpreted] the heroine as some sort of crime-fighting badger." With shredded pants and Too Many Belts.
  • Clash of the Titans has made viewers both laugh and cringe at the utterly baffling plastic-looking "armor" of the Olympian gods. It looked like the production team raided the local costume shop.
  • DC Extended Universe:
    • During close-up shots in Man of Steel, you can see Superman's chest hair just poking up from the lower collar area. Fortunately, this was corrected for his costume in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
    • While a lot of the characters in Suicide Squad were heavily redesigned from their comic incarnations, the most controversial new take was easily The Joker. As part of an effort to modernize the character and distinguish him from past live-action portrayals (such as in Batman and The Dark Knight), director David Ayer chose to depict the Joker with a hip-hop-inspired gangster aesthetic, complete with gold teeth and a bunch of tattoos. Needlessly to say, this decision that did not go over well, and quickly became the subject of mockery from fans, audiences, and critics, with Honest Trailers infamously (and accurately) describing him as a "manorexic Juggalo". Even Ayer himself eventually admitted that the infamous "Damaged" tattoo on the character's forehead was a mistake, calling it "One step too far."
    • Justice League: While most of the costumes have been well-received, The Flash and Cyborg's looks have probably gone over the worst. They both look pretty over-designed (with some saying Flash looked like an action figure), while Cyborg in particular was criticized for being much smaller than he usually is in the comics. Though the In-Universe explanation makes sense (the Mother Box replaced the damaged parts of his body with metal and wasn't going for aesthetics), the fact is that he looks less like a superhero and more like you just took a whole bunch of tinfoil and crumpled it around him, then stuck on a few red lights. Though in Cyborg's case, this was partly a result of the Troubled Production leading to less than ideal VFX, which was later fixed in Zack Snyder's Justice League.
  • Dead Presidents. Apparently, the chic disguise for New York City bank robbers in the early 1970s was "albino raccoon makeup".
  • Death Machines: With the exception of Madame Lee, all the crime bosses and gangsters are given costumes more in line with ordinary insurance salesmen or used car dealers. Brandon Tenold in particular had a field day with this in his review of the film.
  • Whose idea was it behind the scenes of Die Another Day to put Toby Stephens in a getup that looks like The Angry Video Game Nerd costumed up in his NES accessories? This wardrobe is meant to be taken seriously, by the way — they even attempted an emotional scene involving the costume.
  • Richard Burton's film version of Marlowe's The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus involves some of the absolute silliest costumes known to man. Particularly narmful: when Envy, Wrath, and Pride show up in the garden of the Seven Deadly Sins, they are wearing... interesting... helmets. They're huge and oddly shaped. It's very hard to see how Pride could possibly be persuaded to wear something that requires that little dignity.
  • Dune (1984) puts a lot of creepy fetishistic flourishes on the costumes as a general part of its overall weirdness. Behold the majesty of Sting's bronze speedos! Marvel at Kyle MacLachlan's logic-defying bare midriff! (And bare nipples!) Scratch your head in puzzlement at the Fremen's weird black leather stillsuits — in the middle of the damn desert — with nary a hood, cloak, or burnoose in sight!
  • Damodar, The Dragon from Dungeons & Dragons is a pretty standard evil warrior, but with inexplicable blue lipstick.note 
  • Fantastic Four (2005): The uniforms worn by the team looked fairly good and true to the comics, but the latex Thing costume looked rather fake and corny, with many detractors saying it looked like Michael Chiklis was wearing a costume made of basketballs. Doctor Doom also suffered, with his iconic metal mask looking like cheap plastic and his armor and green robes being replaced with a green overcoat worn over business slacks.
  • All the costumes in Fantastic Four (2015). Mr. Fantastic, the Human Torch and the Invisible Woman all have boring black body suits that look like leftovers from the original X-Men movies, which were fine in the early 2000's, but now just look outdated in an era where film studios have finally embraced colorful, comic-accurate superhero costumes. The Thing looks fairly faithful to his comic counterpart, but has no pants for some reason, drawing attention to his Barbie Doll Anatomy. And the less said about Doctor Doom, the better.
  • The title character's suit in Green Lantern, overlapping with Special Effects Failure. Because it's entirely CGI (as opposed to a physical costume with CGI touch-ups), it looks very fake at times, especially with the painted-on feel of the mask.
  • The killer in Hacked Off spends almost the entire film wearing the uniform of a telephone repairman he had murdered. Not a particularly threatening ensemble for a Slasher Movie villain.
  • In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the twins at Slughorn's Christmas party can be seen wearing two ghastly green outfits that appear to be pear costumes.
  • The Hunger Games:
    • Played with in-universe at one point. A sizable chunk of the Districts' chariot ride costumes are either laughable, hideous, or both. See for yourself. Standouts include: both District 5 costumes (sparkly silver tunics with gigantic, glittered circular... things with the wearers' faces peeking out), both District 8 costumes (eye-searing pink and blue motley with frilled hats, in colors that look suspiciously like Sweet-Tarts packaging), both District 10 costumes (shiny rodeo outfits with gold-painted cowboy hats), and Rue's District 11 costume (denim overalls with puffed-up silk sleeves and a laurel wreath made of hay). Cinna himself made mention of not wanting to dress Katniss up in "some stupid costume", indicating that the excess in the costumes was a recurring concern for him.
    • Also the everyday wear of the Capital citizens. Just about everyone wears very loud colors, with hair having wild styles and color. More often than not there is a lot going on, giant hair accessories, poofy skirts and just over-all tacky by a lot of standards. However, it's obvious this is the point.
  • The costumes in Immortals could have been considered Ham and Cheese actors just by themselves.
  • Kaamelott: Premier Volet: Lancelot's outfit comes off as particularly impractical and just plain ridiculous (though the latter effect is very much on purpose). Also, dishonorable mention to Lancelot's royal guards, who look like refugees from Oz.
  • For some reason, somebody thought it would be a good idea to the have the villain of Killer Party, which occurs during a college frat party, dress as a deep-sea diver. And no, it wasn't a costume party.
  • Ray Park's Rugal in The King of Fighters movie. While it's forgivable that they couldn't convince Park to grow a foot taller and gain a hundred pounds of muscle for the role, they could've at least thrown a red dinner jacket and a blond wig on the guy.
  • Jocelyn's hairstyles in A Knight's Tale have certainly evoked this response from many viewers. As someone on the movie's page put it, "It's time for me to style my hair. Handmaiden, fetch me the fork and the royal toaster!" Several of her dresses also qualify, making one wonder why she wasn't thrown out of the courtly areas after being mistaken for a street walker. Might help that she's a Tomboy Princess and the whole thing is a huge Anachronism Stew.
  • Labyrinth still draws a lot of chuckles for David Bowie's skin-tight leggings and crotch bulge in what is supposed to be a kids' film. That said, Bowie's Jareth is something of a sexual predator, and his costume is very popular among fans of the film.
  • The Lone Ranger: Tonto's look is inspired by a painting by an artist named Kirby Satler. It was evidently Johnny Depp's idea to model Tonto's wardrobe after the painting. What he didn't realize is that the bird in the painting was meant to be flying behind the man's head. Of course, this is a deliberate artistic choice; Tonto in this version is insane, and nobody, Comanche, white, or otherwise, tries to claim anything different.
  • When the characters from Madame Web (2024)'s superhero costumes were revealed, fan reaction to Mattie Franklin and Anya Corazon's costumes was receptive aside from the lack of eye lenses. Julia Cornwall's costume, however, was largely negatively received not only for the lack of eye lenses but for her chest emblem being overdetailed compared to the costumes worn by her comics counterpart, and the exposed cheeks making the mask look goofy.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • In Thor, the trousers of Loki's armor seem to be channeling King Jareth's costume in Labyrinth. Tom Hiddleston has mentioned getting teased about them on set. Yeah. It was to the point that he was obviously "retouched" in the final film. His trousers are also ill-fitting, have what looks like mesh saddle bags down the sides, don't match the top part of his armour, and manage the should-be-impossible feat of making Tom Hiddleston's mile-long legs look short.
    • The Avengers has Captain America's new suit. While it's probably one of the most accurate comic-to-film adaptations ever... that doesn't make it good. Other characters have darker colours and more realistic costumes, or retain their less-silly outfits from previous films. Joss Whedon preferred that Cap look more like he does in the comics than his grounded World War II costume, and the result is a bright costume that not only looks like an actual costume, but incredibly out of place. Even Chris Evans couldn't wear it well, with people realizing that without some kind of strap on his chin, a cowl makes his face look pudgy. It even gets a kind of Take That! in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which had Cap not use it and say, "if you're gonna go to war, you have to wear a uniform." The costume was changed for Age of Ultron.
      • The 2012 costume comes back in Spider-Man: Homecoming, for a series of PSA films that Cap presumably filmed prior to the events of The Winter Soldier. Being viewed with the visual artifacts of a worn VHS tape just enhances the inherent goofiness of the costume.
      • The costume also comes back in Avengers: Endgame, in which while the Avengers are time-traveling to 2012, Tony snarks that Steve's 2012 suit did nothing for his ass. Ant-Man disagrees, saying that Steve looks great and that as far as he's concerned, "that's America's ass." Steve eventually fights his past self, and after staring at his 2012 ass, ends up agreeing with Scott.
    • Avengers: Age of Ultron: Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver wear outfits that are closer to regular clothes than superhero costumes. Wanda dons a more traditional outfit at the very end.
    • Some feel this way about the Black Panther suit introduced in Black Panther. His first suit, shown in Civil War, was very popular for just looking outright cool and unique while sticking to the MCU aesthetic. The new one has a stranger helmet that elongates his head and visible eye holes that just make it look sort of goofy.
    • Not a superhero outfit, but just a general outfit — Bucky's appearance in The Stinger of the aforementioned Black Panther. He's in a robe that's barely hanging on, his hair is flowing all over the place and has a lot of volume and he just looks like caveman Jesus. A lot of people find it distracting and hard to take seriously.
    • Black Widow: Taskmaster's outfit has been derided for its generic appearance and not resembling the one from the comics. The face mask, in particular, makes him look like Lord Zedd and doesn't resemble a skull. On a lesser note, he doesn't even wear his white cape. It really doesn't help that other adaptations like Spider-Man (PS4) gave Taskmaster a realistic, utilitarian costume that included a mask that actually resembles his skull face from the comics.
  • Once Upon a Time has many costumes which are tacky, weird, or both. Cases in point: Su Jin, Xuan Nu, and Bai Qian.
  • The Phantom (1996) makes an honest effort to preserve the look of the titular character from the original 1930's comic strips, but given that said look is adapted very literally and consists of purple spandex, black Underwear of Power, and a Domino Mask... it's not a very flattering guise for a live-action 90's movie. The fact this is supposed to be his sneaking outfit in a jungle makes the questionability of this decision and the quality of the execution even more gaudy and ridiculous.
  • The Phantom of the Opera... which, like Batman and Robin, was directed by Joel Schumacher:
    • Also most of the costumes from the operas within the film, leading Cleolinda Jones to refer to them as "giant pink poodle-lady" and "The Dread Pirate Roberts Corps de Ballet." Of these, the "Il Muto" costumes take the cake. It's about pre-French Revolution aristocracy so some flamboyance for all genders is expected...but really, blue and green lipstick?
    • Then there's the costumes for "Masquerade." The lyrics, which describe the ball with lines like "every face a different shade" and "grinning yellows, spinning reds" are being sung by revelers... dressed almost entirely in black and white.
    • Most of the Phantom's outfits accentuate instead of conceal his figure (especially the Red Death suit, which in the stage version was huge and included a full death's head mask).
    • All the women's costumes, except Madame Giry's, somewhat anachronistically show a lot of cleavage, and the slave girl outfits are altered from those of the stage show such that they show midriff. Christine in particular runs around half-dressed far more than would be expected for a naïve young Ingenue.
  • Most of the outfits in Pirates of the Caribbean stick reasonably close to historical accuracy, which makes Angelica's outfits in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides deeply incongruous. Sure, the elasticated corset was meant to help hide Penélope Cruz's pregnancy, but it's an underbust style that wouldn't be invented until a century and a half after the film is set. Compared to what the other female characters wear, it looks like a Sexy Pirate Girl costume from Spirit Halloween.
  • Power Rangers (2017):
    • The look of Elizabeth Banks as Rita Repulsa angered fans, with some comparing it to Marvel villainess Viper and not resembling her costume from the source material.
    • While some fans like the Rangers' suits, many have expressed a strong distaste for them and believe they are far too overdesigned and barely look like any of the costumes from the show. One review described them as looking like "if H. R. Giger designed Iron Man suits".
    • Goldar's look in the film is also widely disliked, mainly due to looking literally nothing like the character and not having much to his design besides being a giant sentient blob.
  • The Pumaman features the world's cheapest superhero costume ever, including slacks and loafers. Some viewers were shocked he wasn't wearing a bath towel for a cape.
  • Red Dragon: Hannibal Lecter's ponytail look in the early scenes was met with derision by a substantial part of the audience, who considered it to be improperly tacky for such a refined character. Fortunately, once the story leaps forward, Dr. Lecter gets a more fitting haircut.
  • The trailer for the 2018 Robin Hood movie has what is clearly Robin Hood in a striped, green suit jacket in the Middle Ages. And that suit only scratches the surface.
  • The Room (2003):
    • While many of the outfitting choices are on the eccentric side, the one that stands out the most is the combination of a business jacket (which is about two sizes too large), black vest, and white cargo pants that Johnny wears during the "I did not hit her" sequence. Apparently, Tommy Wiseau just grabbed a random selection of clothes off the rack when they went to film the scene — the costume designer had taken the morning off to run errands, as Wiseau normally was late to filming — and insisted on sticking with them despite Greg Sestero politely trying to point out how ridiculous he looked.
    • Meanwhile, Wiseau insisted that Juliet Danielle, who plays love interest Lisa, wear seductive outfits that were incredibly unflattering to her body type, leading to the cast of Rifftrax to compare her to "the bloated corpse of Britney Spears." Even worse, Wiseau proceeded to attack Danielle for not looking sexy enough in the clothing he chose for her, bringing Danielle to tears.
  • All of Simon the Magician's outfits in The Silver Chalice, especially the infamous "sperm suit" he wears at the end.
  • The dreary Starfleet pajamas from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Compared to those, the red-tunic-black-trousers getup is practically the height of style. Supposedly, they were intentionally bland because director Robert Wise wanted the audience to focus on the characters' faces (which backfired just a bit). They were so uncomfortable (the hidden zippers were so long that cast members needed assistance when going to the bathroom) that the main cast refused to do another film unless the uniforms were changed, which is one of the first things Nicholas Meyer and Harve Bennett did for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
  • Star Wars:
    • In one Deleted Scene from Revenge of the Sith, the usually impeccably dressed Padmé Amidala is wearing some kind of headdress that several viewers think makes her look like the Predator.
    • Snoke's costume in The Last Jedi is a golden robe that looks much like a bathrobe, which causes fans to not take him seriously and mock him even though he is supposed to be this intimidating overlord on par with The Emperor. It's known that his outfit and pose was based on Hugh Hefner, but what isn't known is why anyone thought that would work on any level.
    • There are also Snoke's Elite Praetorian Guard with two of the guards having helmets that look like oversized drooping graduation caps and all of them with armor plates on their arms that bring to mind the flower petal cape Queen Amidala wore at the end of The Phantom Menace.
    • Amilyn Holdo's purple hair and loose-fitting dress go a long way towards undermining the image of her supposedly being a competent and professional military officer, particularly when compared to Leia's prim haircut and her rough-and-tough military-style coat. In contrast, Holdo's outfit looks both impratical and sloppy, and has been compared by many as making her look like a giraffe. Especially since so much had been made in the supplemental materials about the Republic government being run by pretentious politicians and the Resistance is depicted as dirt poor. This may have been the point, given Holdo's character arc over the course of The Last Jedi. The Art of the Last Jedi reveals that Holdo was going to wear a military uniform in early sketches of the character.
    • During Kylo Ren's shirtless scene in The Last Jedi, roughly 1/3 of his chest is blocked by high-waisted pants. Apart from not suiting his overall appearance... the fangirls were not pleased.
    • While not the most ridiculous outfit in Star Wars, some viewers think that Zorii Bliss's outfit in The Rise of Skywalker looks more like she's cosplaying as a sexy Power Ranger than a tough gang boss, or that she forgot to put anything over thermal underwear; the outfit doesn't look like it would offer much protection in a battle or keep her particularly warm on Kijimi, the snowy planet she's based at.
  • Neal McDonough in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li. McDonough really does resemble M. Bison from the games, except for the beard and business suit. And even if the pseudo-Nazi uniform was deemed too silly for the movie — and that'd take some doing — there's no real excuse for the beard. The usual comment on McDonough-Bison is that the costumers appear to have gotten him mixed up with Geese Howard.
  • Tim Burton's unmade Superman Lives would have featured Superman in a black, Borg-inspired suit, designed by Jon Peters. This was probably inspired by the similar costume he wore in the comics during Reign of the Supermen. Still, when they got then-lead actor Nicolas Cage into their concept suit for a photo shoot, the results... were not pretty.
  • The 1969 version of True Grit. Not only does she have an obviously 1960's hairstyle, Mattie also wears black nylon tights at the end of the movie.
  • In The Twilight Saga: New Moon, when Alice shows Aro her vision of Bella being a vampire, Bella and Edward are seen running through the forest in slow motion... wearing clothes that look like they came right out of 18th-century Colonial America. Needless to say, this scene drew much unintended laughter from the audience. Here's a screenshot of the narmful scene.
  • The Wild World of Batwoman: Batwoman. See here. The best part? Actress Kathryn Victor assembled that thing from her own personal wardrobe.
  • X-Men Film Series
    • The costume Erik wears in the last scene of X-Men: First Class has a bright purple cape and modified the helmet so that it's magenta and has little horns, which are straight out of the comics, as seen here. The rationale for the costume in-universe is that humans think mutants are spawn of the Devil, so Magneto plays up to it with a red horned costume. In real life, the color scheme was probably chosen because the artists had an extremely limited palette to work with and needed something that contrasted with the X-Men's blue and yellow outfits.
    • X-Men: Days of Future Past: Magneto's chest piece gets flak for looking cheap and silly.
      • Likewise, Magneto of both past and future has a cape with one half full and the other half only a half cape, making some bizarre 3/4 cape. It sort of makes sense for Future Magneto (fashion choices are limited in a Bad Future) but then his '70s' self rolls out with it and we're left to assume that, no matter how many options Magneto has, he just has no taste in clothing.
      • While the future outfits aren't bad by any means, there's been a lot of flak for them being rather dull and unmemorable; of course, this is a problem people have had with the costumes since the first film.
      • Quicksilver's outfit also got a lot of flak over the silver jacket and such, though this dialed down after the released film, which made him into a One-Scene Wonder.
    • Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which may just be the most hated comic-to-screen translation of all time. His mask and red tights were done away with and replaced with red pants and a shirtless look. He was given forearm blades and a sewn-up mouth, as well as weird eye markings that were meant to make his face resemble his mask from the comics. To say fans were displeased would be an understatement. This incarnation was even given a Take That! in the later and better-received Deadpool.
  • Zardoz has this in spades. Sean Connery + thigh high boots + what looks like a red diaper and suspenders made out of pipe insulation = Brain Bleach. For this, John Boorman has no excuse, but he does have an explanation (paraphrased): "Um, it was The '70s, and I was doing a lot of drugs. Frankly, even I'm not entirely sure what parts of the movie are about."

    Live-Action TV 
  • Deathlok in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Season 1. His initial costume was rather cheap-looking, leading fans to joke that he looked like a grown man wearing laser tag gear. His revamped design from Season 2 was better received.
  • Angel had a similar problem as Buffy (see below), but apparently after Doyle left they ditched the second bag and gave everything to Cordelia.
    • One particularly notorious one was the dress she wore when revealing she was pregnant with Connor's baby. It was referred to by fans as the black widow dress of doom.
    • Cordelia's various hairstyles after season 1 in general weren't (always) bad in and of themselves, but considering her previous fashionista persona and the fact that she was supposed to be in her early twenties, they weren't great either. Giving Charisma Carpenter, already 10 years older than her role, matronly bobs didn't help sell her as someone just out of high school.
  • Blake's 7 often had strange costumes. But two in the episode "Weapon" take the cake: those of the weapons designer (the man in the picture) and the bond-slave (the woman). (As someone wrote, "It's hard to perform manual labor when you're dressed like Ming the Merciless.)
  • The costumes of Bridgerton were praised for their color and detail but also drew criticism for how poorly most of the dresses fitted. The iconic Regency waistlines, which traditionally sits directly below the breasts, often ended up in the middle of the actresses' busts making it look like their gowns are several sizes too small. Additionally, the actresses were all made to wear tightly-laced corsets even though Regency shilouettes don't require them, which contributed to the fitting issues of the dresses.
  • There was a long-running joke on Television Without Pity about the wardrobe bag game on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: one bag had a list of ridiculous wardrobe items, the other had a list of cast members.
    • It made a bit more sense for Xander and Willow (in early seasons) to dress like Rummage Sale Rejects, since they were supposed to be unfashionable nerds. But we were supposed to see Buffy and Cordy as The Fashionista…
    • Necessary as they were, given that Spike and Angel's usual hair would have looked extremely out of place with 17th and 19th century fashion, the wigs used for their historical flashbacks were distractingly fake-looking. They only look worse next to their female vampiric counterparts Drusilla and Darla, who were able to have their natural hair styled to the time-period's fashion. And no, it does not get better even in Spike's season 7 flashbacks, when the show had considerably higher production values.
  • Charmed: Many of the Halliwell sisters' costumes were criticised for being extremely skimpy, often inappropriately so for the scenes they're worn in, or just outright tacky. In the years since the show ended all four lead actresses have admitted to hating some of the things they had to wear.
  • Doctor Who runs into this sometimes, especially in the old series. Alien fashion or no alien fashion, some of those costumes were just plain hilarious. Usually it just adds to the show's Narm Charm.
    • "The Dominators" is known for having unusually bad costume design for the era. For the Dulcians, it consists mostly of curtains. The Dominators wear horrible fringe-covered plastic jumpsuits with massive foam collars and a lot of eyeliner.
    • In the same season, "The Seeds of Death" puts most of the human guest characters into absolutely hideous Space Clothes whose design around the hips makes them look like nappy fetishists.
    • The Doctor themself has often worn fairly ridiculous outfits. They generally get away with it, with the exception of the Sixth Doctor, whose costume is usually regarded as being too crazy and hideous for even the Doctor to pull off. Even Colin Baker realized this, arguing for a basic black ensemble for the Doctor to showcase his darker persona in this regeneration. He was overruled by John Nathan-Turner, who felt that the "Technicolor Timecoat" fit Six's "fractured personality"; ironically, Nathan-Turner himself would come to regret the eyeball-searing coat after learning that it forced the set designers to push everything to a similar level of intensity. Judging from the other Time Lords, it seems to be a species trait.
    • John Nathan-Turner is particularly un-fondly remembered for his desire to give the Doctor Symbol Motif Clothing for Merchandise-Driven reasons. This led to Doctors from the time of the Fourth's burgundy outfit onwards to incorporate red question marks, usually on the shirt lapels and braces, though by the time of the Seventh Doctor they'd leaked out into a fair isle design on a Homemade Sweater from Hell and onto the handle of his umbrella (Four, by contrast, typically buried them under his scarf).
    • The Third Doctor's plaid overmantel which simply does not go with any of his velvet jackets.
    • Some fans do not like the Thirteenth Doctor's outfit. The decision to give her trousers that are too short make her look like a child playing dress-up and highlight Jodie Whittaker's stature. Furthermore, the decision to give her a fanny pack in Arachnids In The UK is not only unfashionable, but redundant seeing as her pockets are supposed to be bottomless.
    • The Twelfth Doctor's polka dot shirt in "Kill the Moon". Thankfully he's in the Sanctuary base 6 suit for most of the episode.
    • "The Androids of Tara": The planet Tara gives new meaning to the phrase Planet of Hats, with the absurd royal crown, the spiked helmets, Romana's apparently fashionable giant purple hat, and above all, the Archimandrite's tall, sparkly, rainbow-coloured hat.
    • Lalla Ward said later that the costume department let her wear pretty much whatever she wanted. This got her into a little bit of accidental embarrassment, as in "City of Death", she decided to wear a Victorian girls' school uniform, innocently unaware of the reaction that some adult male fanboys would have to it.
    • Castrovalvan leaders wear various silly plastic bucket hats. The Portrieve, their leader, is signified by a two-tiered silly plastic bucket hat.
    • Lampshaded to an extent in the episodes featuring the Eleventh Doctor — after proclaiming that "bowties are cool" and "fezzes are cool" in series five, the fandom embraced those statements and now the Doctor's penchant for ridiculous headgear is a running joke. This, however, is far more tame than most examples, as Eleven's base, nerd-chic outfit isn't bizarre, and his attempts to accentuate it with kooky headgear are invariably curtailed by River Song taking his newest hat away from him and shooting it.
    • The Time Lords' high-collared robes and ornate headpieces that appeared in any Gallifrey story from "The Deadly Assassin" onwards. In "The Deadly Assassin", these are explicitly supposed to be ceremonial garb, so the impracticality can be forgiven. However, later stories make them the standard everyday wear for Time Lords in a costume example of Flanderization.
  • Nearly every costume of the nobles in the Frank Herbert's Dune miniseries looks completely insane. This has led to it being dubbed the Funny Hats version of Dune. Theodor "Dodo" Pistek, the film's costume designer (he really lives up to that name), also did Those Hats in Amadeus, designed the uniforms of the Czech Castle Guard... and was a Formula 1 driver. (Note to everyone: just because the work is set 22,000 years in the future does not mean you are entitled to have people wear whatever ridiculous costumes you please.)
  • The Eternal Love: Some of the costumes are too colourful, too weird, or just plain ugly. Take Jing Xuan's costume (right) (yes, he really does have yellow pompoms on his shoulders) and Jing Xin's costume that looks like two different outfits (right) for example. Then of course there's the emperor's glittery hat.
  • In what are otherwise stunningly beautiful costumes on Game of Thrones, the outfits worn by Margaery Tyrell in season two could only be described as wrapping Natalie Dormer (an actress whose characters appear not once but twice as examples on the Hot Consort trope page—and is the page image, at that) in an ugly brown burrito. However, this is actually a Justified Trope: costume designer Michelle Clapton has stated that this was supposed to be a deliberately unsuccessful design In-Universe, a flawed prototype design that Margaery moves away from as she develops her royal persona.
    • When the Sand Snakes were introduced in season five their costumes were criticised for having what appeared to be false nipples on their breastplates. The costume designer eventually revealed that this was due to a mistake and not part of the design. Apparently the way the breastplates were constructed left bumps on the chest that were supposed to be sanded down but for some reason this didn't happen.
    • While not ugly per se, Cersei's black outfits in the later seasons look oddly anachronistic, given their glossy and plastic-like textures (the fact that she wears her hair in a very modern short haircut further heightens the Anachronism Stew effect).
  • Go Princess Go: Some of the costumes are so crazy they make you wonder if the costuming department was trolling everyone. Cases in point: this red and black thing, this purple thing, and this black thing (yes, that wooden frame is part of the outfit).
  • The outfits the heroes of the Inhumans wear day-to-day were derided even before the show premiered. Feast your eyes. Between Medusa's shoulder pads making her look like she has too short a neck, Black Bolt's jacket seemingly having a pillow stuffed in and Gorgon's stylish carpet-poncho-thing, they all look like beginner cosplayers.
  • House of the Dragon:
    • Just like on its predecessor show, the Targaryen white wigs continue to be a problem area, with one critic even stating that the dragons looked more realistic than the hair. Additionally, the Race Lift of House Velaryon has led to some highly questionable white wigs with curly and dreadlock textures, particularly for the Velaryon children, which were criticized and, unsurprisingly, memed by the audience due to how ridiculous they looked in some scenes. Even Rhaenyra's brown-haired sons get in on it with Jacaerys for some reason having a brown wig even though Harry Collett's natural brown hair (which is also curly, similar to Jace's biological father Harwin Strong) would have done just fine on its own.
    • Most of the costumes themselves are gorgeous, but there have been multiple issues with improper fitting, likely due to COVID guidelines restricting the usual fitting sessions with the actors. One example is the sleeved yellow dress worn by young Rhaenyra; the way it sits on her shoulders makes it seem too big for her and the construction of the bodice causes the material to bunch up in the wrong places, looking too tight across the bust and rumpled around the collar and stomach. Considering Rhaenyra is the princess of a family at the height of their power (and all her other clothes look fabulous), it raises questions as to why she'd be wearing what looks like someone else's hand-me-downs.
    • The crown of Aegon the Conqueror received mixed reviews. With a lot of people pointing out its lack of trademark square rubies even though it looked like it had slots for them. The fact that its shape is more ornate than describedFrom the books  played a role as well.
    • Unlike on Game of Thrones, where the showrunners alone oversaw the costuming department, on HotD each episode director passed on their own guidelines for the dresses worn in the episode, leading to the main characters' wardrobes appearing disjointed. While on the predecessor show, each region, house and character had a cohesive set of fabrics, patterns and historical influences used in their costume design, Rhaenyra and Alicent do display some color coding, but otherwise their dresses are all over the place, ranging from 6th century Byzantine influences, to Tudor era and Renaissance designs.
  • Kamen Rider:
    • Shows in the late Heisei and Reiwa era have a habit of making use of Prop Recycling for less important costumes, particularly near the tail end of a show when the budget runs thin and needs to be saved for the typically special effects-intensive final episodes. Sometimes the recycling comes together beautifully and you get a well-received fusion costume like Grease Blizzard. Sometimes you get a Solomon, whose costume is mostly made out of parts from a previous show's Monster of the Week that are visibly lower-quality than a Rider suit's ought to be.
    • The costumes that main Riders typically get as an extra final form in movies are often made of new parts, but since there's no further up to go from the real final form, the results are less than impressive. Decade Complete is already considered to be among the most gaudy-looking final forms, with the cards of the past Riders on his chest and helmet without really adding anything else to complement or enhance the card additions, but Decade Complete 21 fits 11 more cards on him by making the chest even bulkier, the helmet even taller, and taping a bunch of cards onto the inside of a cape. A Badass Cape this is not.
    • Kamen Rider Decade: Diend's look has been joked that he looks like a radiator-themed Rider instead of a barcode.
    • Kamen Rider Geats plays the Prop Recycling variety for Stylistic Suck, since the recycled props are painted in an obviously cheap single color and come with the Armed Raise Buckles that nobody wants. Then it plays it straight later when the budget runs out, but it's the thought that counts.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power:
    • Gil-Galad's seemingly Roman-inspired headpiece has been the subject of a great deal of mockery, as have Celebrimbor and Elrond's hairstyles, with some noting the strong resemblance to Steve Harrington's hair in Stranger Things.
    • The Three Rings of Power look more like something you can buy on Etsy than the pinnacle of Noldorin craftsmanship. Even the metal and stones appear noticeably cheap in the closeups.
    • The armor worn by the Numenoreans (specifically Miriel's) is a visible mix of some plate armor and undershirts with the armor design printed on them.
  • Lost Love in Times: Some of the costumes are very strange. Especially these bizarre headdresses.
  • Men with Sword: Two words. Feather boa. Not exactly the sort of fashion you'd expect to see in ancient China.
  • Novoland: Eagle Flag:
  • Once Upon a Time: Emma Swan's wardrobe declined in quality in the later seasons of the show, but the crowning injustice has to be the wedding dress she wore when she became "Mrs. Captain Hook" - not only is it an poorly-made and ill-fitted knock-off of Grace Kelly's dress, the style doesn't seem to suit Emma's character at all.
  • Player: Reporter Shin's atrocious hairstyle. Ha-ri wears a wig replicating it when he impersonates Shin, and looks equally ridiculous.
  • On the 2015 version of Poldark :
    • Most gowns featured in the show are hopelessly old-fashioned for the 1790s, until everyone suddenly starts wearing classic Empire line Regency costumes from one moment to the next, without showing the transition in fashion that took place during the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth.
    • A lot of Demelza, Elizabeth and Morwenna's maternity gowns are laced quite bizarrely, and in some cases it's painfully obvious that their pregnancies are fake since a) no one during production seemed to take into account that pregnancy often causes a person's breasts to increase in size, meaning the normally slender actresses stay flat as a pancake up top and b) the fake stomachs are positioned far too low down on their abdomens. The result is that it seems as if their stays are actually trying to squeeze their babies out of them, like a tube of toothpaste!
  • Pretty Little Liars has gained a following of people who watch the show just to see the garish, WAY over the top outfits the girls wear each episode, with Aria being usually the worst offender. It's even lampshaded in an episode where Aria's mother Ella comments that she shouldn't ask her daughter about fashion, since "she wears forks as earrings".
    • The series can be a little bizarre to watch for anyone who's been in high school recently, as the girls often wear outfits that would violate most schools' dress codes, including but not limited to high heels, hoop earrings, very short miniskirts and shorts, and spaghetti straps.
  • The Princess Wei Young: Tuoba Yu's hairstyle. Not only is it historically inaccurate, it's so bizarre it leaves you wondering if the costume department was short of wigs and decided to use bits of rope instead.
  • A lot of viewers have pointed out that the majority of the costumes worn on Reign, especially Mary and her ladies' outfits, don't look remotely like actual clothing from 16th-century Europe. Many of the dresses are actually quite pretty, but most of them resemble 21st-century prom dresses rather than Renaissance fashion. The costume designers later admitted they had a very small budget for the costumes by period piece production standards, and very little time to make them. In order not to hold up production, they often had to buy prom dresses from various clothing stores and modify them for the show.
  • The BBC's 2006 Robin Hood series had some truly dire costuming that's been compared to "The 11th Century Gap". Marian occasionally had some nice, reasonably period-accurate dresses but was also stuck in the likes of a bright yellow cropped cardigan that looked like it was bought on the high street. There's also the Sheriff of Nottingham wearing Birkenstock sandals and a soldier from the Crusades wandering around in modern camo-print trousers. The worst example may be the all-female squad of assassins who wore halterneck, spandex jumpsuits in teal-green.
    • In season three, village girl Kate joined the outlaw team, donning a brand new dress that... well, let's put it this way: if you were living rough in the forest, regularly running away from soldiers and engaging in plenty of arduous physical activity, would you wear a heavy ankle-length dress with weird little tassels on the sleeves that could easily snag the undergrowth? The costume clearly impeded the actress's ability to move, leading to no small degree of Narm at the sight of her lumbering clumsily around, and securing her position as the show's least popular character, especially in the wake of former female characters Marian and Djaq, who were each intelligent enough to wear pants in the forest.
  • RuPaul's Drag Race has a lot of intentional examples because, well, being over-the-top is sometimes par for the course of being a Drag Queen. However, a few examples have left fans scratching their heads wondering what made the queens think wearing them was a good idea. Some notable examples include:
    • Kennedy Davenport's "Death Becomes Her" ensemble which she tried to describe as a hooker "who was thrown in a fire and crystallized" seemingly invoking a phoenix, but the outfit and coagulated blood made her look more like roadkill chicken.
    • Kandy Muse's "Beast Couture" saw her walk in a blindingly-green jumpsuit attached to who she calls "her alien Judy" which just looks bizarre and not fitting with the theme.
    • Design challenges are usually exempt from this as sometimes a vision just doesn't come together and queens are under time pressure (even though with the show being over a decade old, many agree queens should be wiser to at least having passable sewing skills). Still, fans couldn't help but gag (for the wrong reasons) at LaLa Ri's "Bag Ball" dress which was literally just paper bags glued to a jumpsuit. It was so bad, Ru created the Golden Boot Award at the reunion just to "honor" the garment.
  • NBC's live 2013 broadcast of The Sound of Music seemingly ignores the script regarding Maria's dress when she first arrives at the von Trapps' home. In the real Maria von Trapp's autobiography that inspired the musical, she claims to have worn an old-fashioned blue dress trimmed with "funny latticework," which made her feel very self-conscious. Accordingly, the musical has comic dialogue about the ugliness of her dress, with Captain von Trapp requesting that she put on a different one before she meets the children, and Maria explaining that she has no other "worldly clothes" and only has this dress because Even Beggars Won't Choose It. The original Broadway production gave Mary Martin a dress very close to the real Maria's description, while the beloved 1965 movie put Julie Andrews in an even more homely gray dress with an equally unflattering jacket and hat. But the 2013 NBC version dressed Carrie Underwood's Maria in a smart-looking, short-skirted brick red dress, not at all old-fashioned and only slightly drab at worst. Yet the dialogue about its supposed ugliness is still intact.
  • Many civilian outfits on Star Trek: The Next Generation are very tacky and garish.This outfit Q wore in "Deja Q" was the reason for Picard's legendary Face Palm.
    • It's worth noting that once Q gets his powers back, the very first thing he does is use them to switch outfits.
    • The Next Generation also has the Early-Installment Weirdness of the man skirt, AKA the skant. It was created on the reasoning that with complete gender equality, a skirt uniform would have to be unisex.
  • Stranger Things: By Season 4 of the series, many viewers remarked that the child actors had noticeably aged too much (some even into their twenties) to be convincing as the younger kids they still had to play, with their youthful clothing only making their real ages clearer and more awkward. Especially bad is Will Byers' unchanged hairdo, with the bowl cut that once looked cute on prepubescent Season 1 Noah Schnapp being very ill-suited to the now late teens actor; Schnapp himself tried in vain to get it changed.
  • Supergirl:
  • Torchwood: "Cyberwoman" features the eponymous character in a metal... thing... and high heels. What the costume department were likely going for is a sort of metal version of the 1950s evil dominatrix leather wear. If so, it's a painful misfire. It gains bonus demerits for making absolutely no sense whatsoever for the people who designed it in-universe. One of the things the Cybermen want to remove is gender distinctions. A sexy dominatrix look would not exactly be in line with that aim. It could almost be explained by the fact that she was rescued in the middle of assimilation, meaning a half-naked partially-complete look might be justified, if not for the fact that every other partial Cybermen conversion seen in the franchise was designed as pure Body Horror.
    • The outfit is a Shout-Out to the work of the Japanese BDSM/cyborg-fetish erotic artist Hajime Sorayama, which sadly points out how those outfits wouldn't work in real life.
  • Ugly Betty is supposed to be a fashion victim, but Season 3 took it way too far when Patricia Fields took over as costume designer. Betty went from frumpy to looking like a deranged clown. And though she's supposed to be poor, these monstrosities were obviously expensive designer items, which she never wore more than once. Also, the people on the show who are supposed to be fashionable didn't look much better.
  • The Untamed:
    • While it depends on the viewer's sense of fashion, many do share the opinion that most of Lan Xichen's wardrobe looks like he's wearing curtains for robes.
    • Depending on who you ask there are also some fans who don't like how the crew decided to give both Nie Mingjue and Wen Ruohan a mustache, pointing out that they look more silly than intimidating and would actually come across as more properly imposing if they didn't have the facial hair.
  • Costuming for TV productions of War and Peace is usually fine, but many viewers found the female costumes in the 2016 BBC version utterly bizarre. In her very first scene, Anna Pavlovna Scherer wears a satin gown that totally exposes one of her shoulders. Helene Kuragina wears practically nothing but anachronistic and scandalous outfits, frequently looking as if she's dropped in from the 20th century rather than living in the early 19th. It says a lot that Helene's most period-accurate dress is the one she dies in.
  • On The X-Files, for some unknown reason, Scully spends the first few seasons wearing some incredibly boxy, unflattering pant suits in outrageous colors—including brown plaid and various shades of maroon. It got better over the course of the series, where the odd colors were traded in for mostly black and gray.
    • In the latter part of season one and early season two, the cuts were to hide Gillian Anderson's pregnancy. No excuse for the rest of the time, though. In IGBN's Duchovny-Anderson conversation DVD, David Duchovny mentions he'd want Scully's wardrobe "after season four".
  • Most of the costumes on The Witcher (2019) look pretty good, but there are some exceptions:
    • The mass-produced Nilfgaardian armour of the regular infantry. They look utterly ridiculous; comparisons range from tree bark to even veiny scrotums. This was so bad that the showrunner confirmed they were having the armour redesigned for season 2.
    • Cahir's own helmet has a large drooping plume and tiny wings, yet Ciri, in stark opposition, still mentions it looked like a terrible bird of prey when it looks anything but. This was likely done to make the helmet more practical, but it's hard to deny that they ended up with something that looks far less impressive than it was intended to be.
    • Jaskier somehow acquires a pair of brown baggy trouser pants for Geralt to wear at Pavetta's birthday feast. To clash with his shimmering turquoise doublet. Mousesack does make fun of this outfit, so it's possible it's meant to be this in-universe.
    • Many agreed that Yennefer has many beautiful clothes, but they look more like gowns for a Hollywood awards show than a medieval-inspired high fantasy. Probably the worst offenders are the lacy Fifty Shades of Grey mask she wears in episode five and the rope dress in episode 8. On a similar note, many wondered who decided to put Yennefer in unflattering makeup (especially the eyeshadow), as it doesn't suit the actress.
  • The actual costumes for Peaky Blinders are mostly fine, but the ladies hairstyles in Series 1 are distractingly modern. Grace in particular sports a very mid-2010's mid-length beachy wave 'do with dark roots and highlights in what is supposed to be 1919.
  • Space: 1999: The first-season uniforms were designed by famous fashion designer Rudy Gernreich, so you'd expect something really cool and interesting. That was far from the case — the result was rather boring, with drab-coloured, rather generic jumpsuits. It didn't help that the uniforms were designed not just to be unisex, but to de-emphasize the women's bodies (they were rather loose-fitting and worn without bras) — the effect was more bland than interestingly androgynous. Both the Andersons admitted later that Gernreich's involvement was far more for the "marquee value" of his name in the opening credits, making the show look as prestigious as possible, than because they thought he'd be the best person to design the uniforms. The fact that Gernreich was a personal friend of Barbara Bain also played some part in it. It was not entirely surprising that for the second season, the uniforms were changed without Gernreich's involvement, both to make the somewhat more colourful and more feminine or masculine depending on the wearer.
  • When Calls the Heart: A lot of the costumes are very obviously modern, off-the-rack clothing. The costume designer has said Hallmark wants the series to be somewhat visually in line with their other media (especially regarding color palette), and it doesn't break their budget trying to continuously come up with new clothes for a decent-sized cast. The costume staff modify a lot of it as best they can, but it can be very jarring to see an obviously anachronistic cut or fabric. It doesn’t help that despite The Gay '90s setting, no woman is ever seen with their hair up or a hat and all of the men are clean shaven.

    Music 
  • Dahvie from Blood on the Dance Floor wear long hair, tattoos and makeup with facial paint, that looks incredibly bizarre.
  • Slipknot wears matching uniforms with bizarre masks for each individual member of the band. It should be noted that they were deliberately invoking this trope to show off their eccentricity.
  • A lot of Lady Gaga's notorious outfits (the meat dress, the Kermit the frog top, the gun bra), though it's more "What the fuck!" instead of "What the hell?" "What the fuck" implies genuine disbelief that someone would wear something so outrageous while "What the hell" is more "What Were You Thinking??"
  • Björk appears in bizarre outfits, most famously her swan dress.
  • Peter Gabriel, especially during his days with Genesis, where he would dress as a flower or elf on occasions. He said he did this to conquer his stage fright, since he wasn't afraid of people having a laugh at the costume, because the costume isn't him. A lot of musicians create personas for themselves on stage to compartmentalize the fear of performing.
  • KISS have said that their 1979-80 Dynasty/Unmasked era costumes were when they started going downhill. The outfits were supposed to make them look like superheroes, but they instead looked like something from a Las Vegas casino show.
  • K-Pop artists are often given strange outfits for their album concepts. Case in point: SHINee's outfits in 2013's "Dream Girl" MV, and... whatever this is on Ravi's head in the MV for their late 2014 comeback "Error". The former looks like SHINee robbed a fabric store in the dark, while the costume department definitely made quite the, ahem, error with the latter.
  • A lot of recent metal bands perform with very nerdy, "emo" fashions, contrasting quite startlingly with some of their music. This is a drastically inverse approach to those of older acts, who took upon themselves "badass" Leatherman and Post Apocalyptic-style imagery to match the feel of the music they played. While it does share similarities to the stripped-down "jeans, t-shirts and long hair" approach Thrash bands took in reaction to the overly elaborate Hair Metal of the time, even those acts had looks which fit the music. Current bands (both the "emo" type and the "casual" typenote  seem to take the "anti-image" approach to the furthest possible extreme.
  • Elton John in his glam period often went in this direction, especially during the Leather Jackets tours of 1986 (just before he gave up on the crazy costumes altogether).
  • Emmanuel Pahud's performances of Debussy's Syrinx and Lensky's Aria from Tchaikovsky's Evgeny Onegin, in which he inexplicably wears Chinese clothes.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic mocks the Green Goblin's design from Spider-Man in "Ode to a Superhero" thus:
    And he's ridin' around on that glider thing
    And he's throwin' that weird pumpkin bomb
    Yes, he's wearin' that dumb
    Power Rangers mask
    But he's scarier without it on!

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Poor Jorge González went through this in both WCW and WWE. As El Gigante in WCW, he had this silly armor that he wore to the ring. As the Giant González in WWE, he had that infamous Bigfoot-like muscle suit.
  • Even if The Shockmaster (Fred Ottman, a.k.a. "Typhoon" and "Tugboat") hadn't face-planted in his debut entrance at WCW's Clash of the Champions in 1993, it's hard to believe that anyone would have taken him seriously when his costume consisted of a black vest, a pair of jeans, and a silver-painted Stormtrooper helmet covered in glitter.
  • Tori (Terri Poch)'s cat bodysuit deserves honourable mention from WrestleMania XV. She should have just worn one of Sable's catsuits.
  • When Goldust became "The Artist Formerly Known As Goldust" he wore some very disturbing outfits including his infamous silver body suit at WrestleMania XIV complete with silver and red face paint and a black leotard.
  • Molly Holly. At a time when the WWE Divas were moving to a sexier image, Molly ran in the opposite direction. She adopted a prude persona following her 2002 heel turn and wore the most matronly, unappealing outfits she could. One person on YouTube described her sense of style as "Soccer Mom". Check out her swimsuit from the competition against Terri Runnels and her 2002 Santa's Little Helper dress as shining examples.
  • Impact Wrestling giving Jacqueline a Confederate flag uniform, especially since she was paired with Americas Most Wanted, who had a western gimmick.
  • A lot of Layla's more recent outfits where the theme seems to be a combination of snake skin and coloured tinfoil.
  • Maxine from WWE NXT season 3 was introduced to us wearing an open blouse with a neon bra underneath, topped off with a skirt and suspenders. Then her ring gear for the evening appeared to be an ice dancer costume.
    • Speaking of NXT, Naomi deserves a mention from the Halloween Episode. For the costume contest, she showed up dressed as the Hamburger Helper hand - yes she wore a giant foam hand. And she wrestled in that very costume. First of all, if she knew she'd be wrestling in her costume why didn't she wear something more sensible? And secondly, has she never seen a WWE costume contest before? Less is generally more in those things.
  • Alicia Fox and her piñata gear.
  • Montel Vontavious Porter's infamous purple and silver "Power Ranger" costume.
    • Justified however, as MVP has several potentially inflammatory tattooes that needed to be covered.
  • Jay Cruz and Eddie Rios have no idea how any of you can wear those dull pants. On the flip side, the rest of the locker room finds the bright and oddly patterned outfits of Los Ben Dejos (Dos Ben Dejos?) distracting at best.
  • When actress and journalist Maria Menounos wrestled a match at Wrestlemania, she honored her Greek heritage in her ring gear by wearing white pants and a Greek-flag-themed top. The outfit itself wasn't bad, but the problem came when she and Kelly Kelly did a double stink face on their competition and Eve's makeup rubbed off on the seat of Maria's pants, making it look like it had a giant skid mark.
  • Braun Strowman of The Wyatt Family wears tweed colored trousers with dark patches on the inner sides of his thighs, making it look as though he pissed himself.
  • Invoked by Al Snow during his issue with Jerry "The King" Lawler on the June 15, 1998 Raw, as he had shown up dressed as Avatar, complete with Head wearing an Avatar mask.
    "The last time I wore this outfit you could have stuck a magnet up my ass and dragged me through Fort Knox and I still wouldn't have drawn any money."
  • Invoked on commentary by Eddie Kingston at CHIKARA Running In The Red, November 13, 2005, when Dragon Dragon's mask fell off during his debut matchnote .
    "Oh no! Oh no! His mask is off! Oh, someone's getting fired!"
  • Veda Scott wore mismatched socks as the special referee for a match between Skylar Marie and Luscious Latasha. Subverted, though, since the camera work showed that one of the socks depicted a Flying Saucer using a tractor beam to pick up dinosaurs!
  • Lou Thesz' referee shirt for the AWA World Heavyweight Title match between Nick Bockwinkel (w/Bobby Heenan) and Bruiser Brody that is included on Volume 1: Busted Open of the Wrestling Gold DVD series was covered with many different shapes and really didn't resemble a normal referee shirt.
  • When The Undertaker made his entrance in WrestleMania XXX, he kinda looked like a cool cowboy in a jeweled leather jacket, but when the hat and jacket came off, he looked more like an old-aged delinquent punk with dark red mohawk hair, a bushed goatee, gray eyeliner, body tattoos, a black sleeveless shirt and black pants with red marks on them and tall black boots with leather gloves on, and "a super-tanned body bordering on deep-fried". Some people thought he was out of place as a Rummage Sale Reject.
  • CHIKARA 2014-2015: The outfit Juke Joint Lucas Calhoun wore as Volgar. As Kevin Ford wrote in his review of CHIKARA Moonraker (October 26, 2014):
    "Volgar's gear is horrible. It’s hard to take someone seriously when they look like a baked potato or Power Ranger putty."
  • Crossed with Bizarro Episode: At CZW Allentown Project, January 16, 2004, Sumie Sakai lost a match to Eddie Edwards as the masked Yellow Michinoku Ranger. The Michinoku Rangers were an established team in Michinoku Pro Wrestling, but broke up and unmasked a year beforehand. Why anyone thought to bring back one member while working with a locker room that had no one else associated with Michinoku Pro in it is anyone's guess. You can see more here

    Sports 
  • The National Hockey League has seen its share of uniforms that teams would like to forget. One of the most notorious examples is the New York Islanders 1995 uniform change from an outline of Long Island behind a stylised "NY" to a hockey stick-holding fisherman who bore more than a passing resemblance to the mascot of frozen seafood company Gorton's of Gloucester, prompting New York Rangers fans to nickname their crosstown rivals "the Fishsticks". The Islanders wisely reverted to the old logo two years later.
  • The St. Louis Blues would have worn THIS during a game in 1996 if it weren't for their head coach stepping in and refusing to let his players wear that. Score one for good taste.
  • If only the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim and Los Angeles Kings had stood up and said no to these. Yes, the Great One himself wore that goofy "Burger King" jersey (coincidentally, Gretzky was soon traded to St. Louis), though some fans don't see that short-lived Kings jersey as all that bad these days. The Ducks' third, though, isn't fondly remembered at all, between the cartoony depiction of team mascot Wild Wing, and the nigh-unreadable Mistral font for the player name and number. Though they wound up bringing the jersey back as their Reverse Retro! (7 years after one of the Kings' farm teams wore an updated Burger King)
  • The Vancouver Canucks' Flying V Jersey, liberally covered in "V" symbols, is considered among the ugliest in the history of not just hockey but North American pro sports. The San Francisco design firm that came up with the look supposedly claimed that the Vs stood for "victory". The Canucks did actually reach the Stanley Cup Finals in this look in 1982, being ousted by the dynastic (and classier-looking) New York Islanders. The Canucks toned things down considerably in 1985, before removing the V-stripes altogether (and going back to a white jersey) in 1989.
  • When Reebok's Edge uniform system was being introduced into the NHL, many teams took the opportunity to utilize the different templates available. Several teams opted to stick with traditional designs, but a few teams embraced the new templates, with decidedly mixed results at best. One unpopular aspect of most new uniforms has been vertical piping down the front, often derided as Bettman stripes (named for the unpopular commissioner). A few examples:
  • The success of the Pittsburgh Penguins' 2008 Winter Classic throwbacks, which became their third jerseys the next season, led to the Florida Panthers and Columbus Blue Jackets deciding to borrow some of the jersey concepts. The Panthers' thirds (which were sponsored by JetBlue) weren't well-received by their fans due to their lack of red, the team's original jersey color which had been de-emphasized in favor of blue.note  The Blue Jackets' uniform has been criticized for its liberal use of "Vintage white"note  mixed with modernized fonts, but the biggest WTH goes to the new mascot they introduced with the jerseys... Boomer the Cannon! Yes, the Jackets actually thought an inflatable cannon mascot was a good idea at the time, but it backfired spectacularly due to the mascot's... suggestive connotations. The Jackets management apparently even hoped he might replace Stinger, their original mascot, but Boomer was quietly retired after the 2010-11 season.
  • When the Oakland Seals were purchased by Oakland Athletics owner Charles Finley (who admitted to knowing nothing about ice hockey) in 1970, he decided the two teams needed co-ordinating uniforms, and changed the Seals' Kelly green and royal blue uniforms to the Athletics' Kelly green and California gold, re-branding the team the California Golden Seals. If that wasn't bad enough, the uniforms included matching green and gold skates. Then, in January 1972, things got even more ridiculous when the Seals started taking to the ice in white skates. Hockey fans of the day recall that the skates had a camouflage effect with the ice that made the players look as though they had stumps for legs, and they regularly got scuffed or stained and had to be re-painted, with some Seals players claiming that the many coats of paint made the skates noticeably heavier as the season wore on. When Finley sold the Seals to the NHL in 1974, the white skates were mercifully done away with, but their uniforms were re-coloured to teal and gold, and remained so until the team was relocated to Cleveland in 1976.
  • Coventry City FC's 1970's away strip. Liverpool FC's late '80's home strip wasn't much better.
  • The 1994 FIFA World Cup uniforms for some national teams. Particularly for Brazil, Spain, and the hosts themselves, the USA.
  • The Australian football team (Socceroos) kit in 1990 was a horrid mish-mash of random strokes of gold, green and white that became forever known as the 'spew jersey', which is Australian slang for vomiting, called so because that's what the shirt resembled.
  • Because many baseball fans and owners are so stuck in the past, teams think it's a good idea to hold "Turn Back the Clock Day" and make the players dress in baggy, oversized old-fashioned uniforms for one game. Most fans born after 1950 can only roll their eyes at them. A lot of the bagginess actually comes from how modern players wear their unis, as many of the recent throwbacks have come from the 1960s or later, when jerseys were generally streamlined.
  • Probably the most infamous case of a baseball throwback concept - the 1976-81 Chicago White Sox. Eccentric owner Bill Veeck decided to introduce uniforms inspired by the franchise's first World Series winner. This is the result. The collar flaps stopped at the shoulder seam, and were sewn on flat; the cap logo was incongruously modern; and for one game, they even wore shorts! (The leg scrapes after that game convinced them to stick to long pants.) These uniforms were so bad that when the team tried to bring them back for a throwback uniform night in 2016, their own starting pitcher, Chris Sale, grabbed a pair of scissors and cut them up himself rather than pitch in them.
  • The late 1970s and into the early 1980s was not a good time for cricket uniforms, specifically the one-day format where coloured uniforms are the norm. New Zealand's beige and brown and the West Indies grey pajamas (with the maroon fading to pink fairly quickly) are considered the low points. However, the New Zealand beige has come full circle to retro coolness - as practised by the "Beige Brigade" — to the point an official game (albeit of the "Twenty Twenty" format) was played in 2005 with both Australia & New Zealand wearing the retro uniforms of the 80's.
  • Nike tried beige for the 2008 Australian Open tennis championships, which looked good on Maria Sharapova's publicity photos, but unfortunately did show up sweat rather too well.
  • Because the University of Oregon football team has the support of alum and Nike founder Phil Knight, it has become infamous for breaking out new, outlandish designer uniforms every single ''game." Listing the number of ridiculous combinations they have worn may require its own page.
  • The Fremantle Football Club entered the Australian Football League in 1995, and for the next 15 years had the team colours of purple, green, red and white, with their uniforms having a huge anchor on the front. In 2010, the club thankfully changed to a more conservative purple and white chevron design.
  • The Houston Astros' infamous "Rainbow Guts" uniforms (alternatively known as the "Tequila Sunrise") which they wore from 1975 through 1986. This look has made a comeback in recent years thanks to the Nostalgia Filter, as many teams at lower levels of play have imitated the striped design, and the Astros themselves have worn it as a throwback from time to time.
  • The San Diego Padres, since 2008, have trotted out on the field every Sunday home game in camouflage.
    • Most likely they are (literally) Pandering to the Base, as San Diego has a significant Naval base just across the harbor from Petco Park, with a large Marine Corps presence just up the road at Miramar and Camp Pendleton.
    • The Padres' original colors of yellow and brown led to some fairly awful uniforms in the 70s and early 80s (Of course, it was The '70s). This era is now looked upon more fondly through the Nostalgia Filter, as many Padres fans consider brown more appropriate than navy blue for a team named after the robe-wearing missionaries that helped found the town. The team reverted back to the original colors in 2020, to widespread approval from the fans.
  • The original Denver Broncos colors were mustard yellow and "barnyard brown", and came with incredibly ugly, vertically stripped socks.Observe. After a few games the players held a pregame ceremony where they tossed the socks onto a pile and ritually burned them. One of the few surviving pairs is on exhibit at the Hall of Fame in Canton. The Broncos brought this original look back in 2009 to celebrate the 50th season of the original AFL teams, and it was as ridiculed in 2009 as it was in 1960 (with the added visual oddity of several players twisting the vertical-striped socks). The team changed their uniforms again in 1997 with a radically new logo, swapping the blue from royal blue to navy, adding streaks to the jersey and pants sides, and changing the home jersey color from orange to navy. The fans and press despised the uniforms until the team wound up winning the Super Bowl that same season (they lost their previous four tries). Eventually they reverted back to orange home jerseys, but in the same style as the navy ones.
  • For the Parade of Nations in the 2012 Olympic Games, most countries' teams wore clothes based off their traditional garb, or at least reflecting their flag...and then came the Swedish team, wearing pastel blue and yellow striped shirts. And they weren't alone; consider Mexico's parade of nations outfits. There's also Germany's Pink Girl, Blue Boy outfits.
  • Also in the 2012 Olympics, Brazil's handball team mixed the traditional yellow with green stripes... with multicolored animal prints.
  • In the field of mascots, we have the Leland Stanford Junior University's football team's. You would think, with the team name being the "Stanford Cardinal" (singular, in the sense of the color—as part of Stanford's conscious attempt to be the Harvard of the West, it's a straight rip-off of the Harvard Crimson) that you'd get something of that color, maybe a cardinal (as in a bird) or a cardinal (as in the Catholic kind) or maybe even just Leland Stanford, Jr. dressed up in cardinal (since Harvard does the same with John Harvard in crimson). Nope, they don't have a mascot. So they use the Marching Band's instead. Ladies and gentlemen, the Stanford Tree. Honestly, what can be said that the image does not already convey?
  • To celebrate their 80th season the Pittsburgh Steelers donned the gaudy black and yellow prison stripe throwback jerseys for a few games in 2012.
  • The Tampa Bay Buccaneers original creamsicle-orange jerseys. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that within a decade of ditching them, they won their first Superbowl and ended their run as the NFL's officialy Butt-Monkey. Their new uniforms debuted in 2014 were also considered very odd. While the uniforms overall are debatable, using a digital readout font for the uniform numbers was considered a bit questionable.
  • The "ketchup" away kit of Athletic Club (that is, Athletic Bilbao of La Liga; they used this in 2004 at the inspiration of a local "artist" before switching back to the more traditional red-and-white stripes).
  • A lot of things went wrong for the New Zealand All Blacks in 2007. Many fans think that all bar one of them can be traced back to the first: going from their classic, Exactly What It Says on the Tin all black kit to... this. Many New Zealand rugby fans claim that the despair at seeing the Mighty All Blacks playing in that kit was a greater cause of shame than their highly controversial exit from the World Cup to France in the quarter final stage.
  • For one game in 2007, the Philadelphia Eagles decided to honor their earliest days as the Frankfort Yellow Jackets from the pre-1940's era with these eye-searing baby blue and yellow uniforms. The fact that they won their only game in these uniforms 56-21 is presumably unrelated.
  • Similar to the above, the Seattle Seahawks decided to wear these garish, lime-green jerseys for one game in 2009.
  • In 2007-2008 the Renault Formula One team drivers and mechanics sported white, yellow, blue and orange uniforms, topped off by a completely pointless-looking blue band across the middle of the chest.
  • For the 2015 season, the NFL debuted a new line of one-game only uniforms for the teams playing in some of the Thursday Night games called "Color Rush", meaning each team would wear uniforms that are almost entirely one color. The results were...mixed.
    • Perhaps the most infamous game played was the New York Jets against the Buffalo Bills. The Jets wore all green and the Bills all red, which didn't look too horrendous on its face. However, these two colors going against each other made the game practically unwatchable for people with certain types of colorblindness, to whom the two teams' players ended up looking basically the same. In response, the NFL changed the concept so that any game where this could happen again would have one team wear all white.
    • Another was the St. Louis Rams against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This color combination (Rams in bright yellow, Bucs in bright red) was dubbed the "Ketchup vs Mustard" game.
  • The jerseys in just about every European hockey team are so utterly eye-searing that it's a wonder how any of the clubs can keep a sense of dignity and stoicism and not have the fortitude to protest the idea of having them made into officially sponsored uniforms. Just look at these for example. Never has a jersey been so utterly cluttered in ads that it makes players look like NASCAR drivers. And since the NHL is even about to consider putting ads on jerseys in the future, this resulted in a MASSIVE backlash across the league, since fans do not want to see their favorite teams ruined by corporate-sponsored profligacy on their uniforms and look exactly like the aforementioned garish looking Euro-hockey teams.
  • In 1978, the Colorado Caribous of the NASL wore jerseys with a faux-leather fringe around the midriff.

    Theatre 
  • The costuming for the Broadway version of The Lion King is largely fantastic and truly captures the Savannah feel of the show...until you get to the hyenas and Timon; the former are all decked out in painted hillbilly longjohns with horrible paper maché masks (they're supposed to be ratty and ugly, but couldn't they do with a more primal version of the native garb the other characters had?), while the latter was essentially a 4 foot Timon plushie sewn onto the front of a man in green hillbilly longjohns and clown wig (it kinda looks like Timon is being molested by the Jolly Green Giant). They are really jarring when put beside the fantastic costumes of the other characters.
    • Timon's actor's greenness works in one scene in which the actor is surrounded by plants (it is great camouflage in that one scene). Never mind that when we first meet him, he's standing in a desert. For about five minutes or so.
  • Elisabeth:
    • The Hungarian versions have Death wearing sparkly make-up. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; depending on the actor, it may emphasise Death's inhuman nature. Unfortunately, there's no denying that some actors look utterly ridiculous in it.
    • Not to be outdone, this Berlin production inexplicably has Death sporting a bizarre hairstyle. It makes it hard to take him seriously.
    • In the 2013 Korean production, Death spends half his scenes providing a male example of a Navel-Deep Neckline for no apparent reason.
  • The Broadway version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had the same costume designer as its West End counterpart, but redesigned the Bucket family's costumes to have brighter color schemes — leaving poor Charlie stuck in a hideous orange-and-purple sweater that looks better suited to a Muppet for almost the entire running time.
  • Frozen: MANY people were displeased when Elsa switched from her iconic dress to pants from "Monster" till the end of the musical. An especially weird example, as there was seemingly no reason for this change, except to vary her wardrobe and "empower" her.

    Video Games 
  • Overwatch has its own page.
  • BlazBlue has squirrel girl Makoto Nanaya. Her Stripperiffic battle outfit is ridiculously impractical. Example: here is her costume in Calamity Trigger, here is her NPC costume in Continuum Shift, and here is her playable character costume. The impracticality of it is even lampshaded in one episode of Help Me, Professor Kokonoe!
    Kokonoe: Who the hell goes around dressed like that!? How do you live knowing you're always one slight breeze or sudden cough away from a massive Wardrobe Malfunction!?
  • Castlevania: Judgment features bizarre new outfits for several classic Castlevania characters. The series has never had very period-accurate costumes, but Judgment takes it to hilarious new levels in addition to outright contradicting established character traits. Highlights include Simon (a 17th century monster hunter) wearing what looks like armored versions of a biker jacket and shorts, and almost nothing else; Trevor wearing an eyepatch not seen in any other game and having his entire upper body being covered in belts; Grant (who came from the 15th century) being covered head-to-toe in wrappings and wielding shurikens making him look like a mummified ninja; Shanoa (a witch recognizable for her unholy power source and extremely long hair) being dressed like a nun, complete with crosses and a veil covering her hair; Carmilla, who has a miniature Iron Maiden strapped to her shoulder; and the new character Aeon, who sports comically massive shoes, stitches up the front of his pant legs for no reason, a monocle that isn't held up by anything, a gigantic clock on a stick that goes to 13:00 for some reason (along with a regular pocket watch), and no fewer than three popped collars nested within each other.
  • In both Dead Rising and Dead Rising 2, the player can make some questionable wardrobe decisions. Nothing says intense zombie fighting action like a pink women's business suit and a servbot helmet.
  • Fallout has a lot of strange fashions, which is at least somewhat excused by its Retreaux style. Still, whoever designed the Recon Armor from Fallout 3 has a rather morbid preoccupation with the human buttcrack.
  • Unique and memorable character designs are usually a good thing in fighting games, unless the designers interpret that as "ludicrous, eye-searingly garish and ugly mismatches of colors and patterns for half the cast" like they did in the Fighters Destiny games. Day-glo, animal prints, and odd choices like thongs over tights or full Native American headdresses are just a few of the highlights, and if you're lucky, these won't all be on the same character.
  • Final Fantasy
    • Tifa's cowgirl outfit was bad enough in Crisis Core, especially given she's wearing it during a series of events that are generally very dramatic and it seems completely out of place in such a context. However, it was made even worse when she appears in it during flashback scenes in the Final Fantasy VII remake, because if you've not played Crisis Core, it's even more inexplicable and doubly ruins the drama.
    • Final Fantasy XII has, well, every main character except maybe Balthier, depending on your tolerance for large arrays of coloured rings. Basch is a Rummage Sale Reject with what appears to be a flattened Rubik's cube strapped to his chest, Vaan and Fran wear "armour" with no actual ability to defend vital organs, Ashe sports a neon pink miniskirt, and Penelo's wing-things cannot make sitting down comfortable.
    • Final Fantasy XV has one of the worst and most baffling costumes ever in Cindy, the franchise's first female Cid/"Cidney". She's a car mechanic in a desert location, yet she wears a long sleeve yellow jacket that goes up to her gloves, yet her jacket is a crop-top and is open revealing her breasts and bra. She also wears charcoal-grey leather/pleather leg warmers and very white calf high boots (that look like cheap fashion boots, not steel-toed boots you'd wanna wear working around grease and oil all day). On top of that, she's wearing very skimpy daisy duke jean shorts with her bright pink thong poking out. It looks like about the most uncomfortable thing someone could wear to work on cars in the desert heat all day.
  • Fire Emblem
    • Poor Nowi, many do agree she genuinely has a compelling and tragic story, but to most it is undermined by the baffling decision to give her what amounts to a dragon-scale bikini top, short shorts and garter boots, which on their own wouldn't be too bad, had Nowi not had the body of a pre-teen. While manaketes who look like children aren't anything new to the franchise, her look along with her child-like personality have made it hard for many to take her seriously.
    • Fire Emblem Fates had plenty of head-scratching fashion decisions that seemed to be made with fanservice above practicality, from Camilla wearing nothing but panties and long boots from the waist down, to female armor knights also having a similar problem despite wearing otherwise practical and bulky armor.
    • Compared to Fates, Fire Emblem: Three Houses toned down the fanservice considerably, which only makes Female Byleth's outfit even more jarring by comparison. While the male version at least wore a practical if plain-looking outfit, the female outfit has plenty of odd quirks that while not bad if taken on their own, when combined make it hard to take her seriously as a skilled mercenary. These include a large opening around the chest area, a gratuitous cutout around her belly, and a shorts/floral tights pattern that makes her look more like a raver than a mercenary, and combined with her blank expression in most cutscenes, it makes scenes with her in it hard to take seriously.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The player can take over this role. Utterly serious cutscenes can have the protagonist standing around in any number of insane outfits. The possibilities are in the hundreds, such as: boxers only, a Groucho Marx face mask and tuxedo pants, or even a gimp suit. This last, in a business meeting with his sister.
  • Gelu in Heroes 3 wears what might be the silliest waste of leather in video games that doesn't involve players crafting leather swords.
  • The Last Story doesn't suffer as much, but it does suffer. Upgrading the armors can help make them look more sensible, or a lot worse. There's also a color option in case you think Calista's bright pink armor is too insufferable. Honorable mention goes to the Dragon greaves, which looks like half of a bad Dragon costume that was used at a furry convention. Of course, you could just make them invisible, which just makes the characters run around in incredibly boring underwear.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
  • Mass Effect:
    • Mass Effect 2 has taken some flak for putting several (female) characters in outfits utterly impractical for fighting in. The first game was good about giving characters practical outfits - every team member wore armor, flattering figures be damned. Then in Mass Effect 2 you have Miranda in a sexy Spy Catsuit, Samara in... another sexy catsuit with a Navel-Deep Neckline, and Jack with just some leather straps over her nipples. However, Miranda and Jack have unlockable alternate costumes that are much more reasonable; in Jack's case, she puts a shirt on, and a downloadable costume pack gives Miranda form-fitting composite armor and more sensible boots.
    • Mass Effect 3 received similar criticism when trailers featured Ashley Williams not only wearing what essentially came off as the Alliance's version of Miranda's uniforms but also letting down her hair, which would be impractical during combat. There were alternate outfits available, however; though they only added armor and didn't adjust the hair. There was also the form-fitting hospital gown that was see-through enough that her nipples were visible. It really clashed with the tone the scene was trying to set when you visited her in the hospital.
  • The infamous Varia Suit from Metroid Fusion. What normally set the Varia apart in other games was a more pink color or its trademark tall shoulderpieces. Fusion didn't have the shoulders, so it went for a far more garish look, with a lime-green primary color, with wine-red spots everywhere. No, seriously. It was so bad that when Metroid: Samus Returns brought the Fusion Suit back for Fusion Mode, the Varia was changed to be a dark forest green, with actual pink spots instead.
  • Mortal Kombat 9 has a few of these. Specifically, Sonya Blade's primary costume. Does Special Forces not require their female operatives to at least wear bras or something? And high heels too? Seriously?
    • Mortal Kombat got into the game as early as part 3. Kabal, Stryker, Unmasked Sub-Zero, and especially Shang Tsung stand out the worst, and the weird spandex-y ninja outfits even managed the previously unthinkable feat of making Scorpion look like a dork.
  • In Pokémon Ultra Sun and Moon, several of the alternate costumes after you complete the game have been criticised, most notably the Kommo-o outfit for males that you have to have $1,700,000 for the whole set, with some saying that the main character looks like a stripper wearing it or that the outfit looks like a bondage suit despite the fact that the main character is 11 years old. Many prefer the girl-exclusive Lurantis outfit despite showing a similar amount of skin due to looking less ugly, while being relatively feminine overall.
  • In Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, the narrator suddenly dons a chicken mask for no reason.
  • Resident Evil:
    • In Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, most of the U.S.S have costumes that are fairly intimidating, if not exactly practical in a military sense. Except for Spectre. Ze goggles look goddamn ridiculous.
    • Resident Evil 4 takes place in a Castilian-speaking village from some European country that is not Spain. Excluding the odd The Texas Chainsaw Massacre knock off, everyone is dressed like in 18th century New England.
    • Jessica Sherawat in Resident Evil: Revelations. Black skin tight outfits (with or without high heels) are kind of a dime a dozen such that those aspects aren't worth commenting on, but hers adds the "additions" of one leg of fabric being completely sliced off (wouldn't that cause severe frostbite in cold water?), and a random purple accent on her other leg.
    • As is her teammate Rachel Foley, who wears a similar outfit. While she at least had the sense to not hack one of the legs off for no reason, she's instead wearing a suit that is about three sizes too small and thus can only be zipped up to about her nipple, and has scraggly messy hair with bangs that completely obscure her eyes. It's no frigging wonder she dies within about five seconds of starting their mission, considering she probably can't see and is wearing such a tight suit as to constrict her movements and cut off blood flow to her head.
    • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis has Jill Valentine's infamous tube-top and mini skirt combo. She has a more situation-appropriate long-sleeved top, but for some reason she has it tied around her waist. This one is actually given a nod in the novel, mentioning that Jill chose this ensemble for ease of movement. Whether that's a good justification or not is up to the reader.
  • Rune Factory 4 is the first in the series to allow players to select a male or female protagonist at the start of the game (RF2 allowed you to play as your seven-year-old daughter in the second half of the game). Except...the female protagonist has soda can tabs on her nipples. Um, what?
  • The Saints Row series, with its insane degree of Character Customization, features equally insane wardrobe choices depending on the player's whim. Including hot dog suits and gladiator helmets. This has the potential to ruin the mood of many story cutscenes. A character's funeral is a hell of a lot less of a Tear Jerker when it's attended by a hugely muscular Scary Black Man wearing a bra and a miniskirt with a traffic cone on his head and mime makeup on his face. Saints Row 2 allows you to rewatch cutscenes whenever you want, so you can try out different outfits and see what ruins the mood in just the right way for you.
  • The Secret World and its remake/continuation, Secret World Legends, allow you to do this. And given how darkly horrific and serious the game's NPCs can be, Hilarity Ensues.
  • The clothing provided in nearly all games from The Sims franchise are often regarded as ugly, unfashionable or just plain weird. The modding community for the games heavily focuses on creating clothes, shoes and hairstyles to make up for this. Other creators have developed mods to outright hide the developer-created clothing.
  • Before wearing her iconic red dress, red boots, ring bracelets and bob haircut, Amy Rose from Sonic the Hedgehog used to wear a green shirt, an orange tutu, violet shoes and spiky hair, making her look like a pink-colored Sonic dressed like a schoolgirl. While this example is more benign than many on this page (mainly because her classic design still has fans), people who are used to her modern design can find it too tomboyish and/or childish for the character, forgetting that this design was used before her modern characterization.
  • The Soul Calibur series has been getting worse and worse in this topic with each new entry. It reached its lowest in Soul Calibur IV, specially with Ivy's ridiculous strip-bra. In Soul Calibur V they seemed to recover from it, although there are still some characters with ludicrous outfits.
    • VI makes this worse by removing alternative costume options (which traditionally were more modest than the main ones), though Create-a-Soul allows you to make your own. Even Hilde, the Token Wholesome of the series, got a new design that embroiled her in the recent "boob armour" debate.
    • Another real standout was Asteroth's alternate costume in Soul Calibur III. In the first two games, his alt costume consisted of an executioner's hood (granted, one with stupid looking antennae that curved over his back) and Spikes of Villainy protruding from his shoulders. In three, the hood was changed to a giant claw hammer and the spikes were replaced with nails. Actual giant metal nails.
    • On another note, designs for ZWEI and Viola (V) and Groh (VI) have been complained about for looking too much like JRPG characters in a game based on Historical Fantasy and Magic Realism. Groh particularly has been criticised for looking more like a K-Pop idol than a medieval warrior from Denmark.
  • Who sends a bunch of mercenaries to fight, probably to the death, with paper bags or rubber gloves on their heads? Team Fortress 2 in a nutshell. The most iconic example is probably Demopan. Just LOOK at it, and you will see why some of the diehard fans see him as the symbol of everything that is wrong with the game today.
  • Tormented Souls: While this Chilean Genre Throwback to classic Survival Horror (like Haunting Ground and the older Silent Hill and Resident Evil games) was well-received, a major criticism was directed to Caroline's outfit, which looks impractical, overtly sexualized and has an anime-ish look which clashes strongly with the dirty and gritty atmosphere. The developers responded with a free update which added a second costume choice.
  • Trails of Cold Steel II:
    • Fie is 15, and her default outfit includes a crop-top and shorts, both very small. A more modest alternative outfit is available.
    • Altina Orion's age is not given, but she describes herself as a "younger sister" to Millium, who is 13. She wears a hooded leotard with cut-outs on the front. It would look sexy on an adult woman, but she's a child. She is also a recurring enemy instead of a party member, so no alternative costumes are available.
  • Twisted Wonderland: Diasomnia dorm's school uniform is colored a strong shade of neon green that might take time to get used to looking at.
  • Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines has one set of each kind of armor, which looks different depending on the type of vampire and gender you're playing. Some variations are perfectly reasonable, others are odd-looking (the female Toreador's red pseudo-Chinese outfit looks kind of like pajamas, a weird choice for the most fashionable clan) or bizarre. An armor option that's a leather jacket on a Brujah or a Badass Longcoat on a Ventrue will for some reason be a sexy cop costume on a female Malkavian, or a bondage harness and hood on a male Nosferatu. Just the thing for hack'n'slashing your way through hostile vampires, flesh-crafted abominations, and religious fanatics?

    Web Animation 
  • RWBY: From Volume 7, Jaune's appearance is altered to give him a more mature appearance. He is given short blond hair, skin-tight jeans and top, heavy knee-high boots, and a more Heroic Build appearance overall. The fandom's response wasn't to regard his new appearance as cool or badass, but to instead view it as a walking Chad meme — a reaction that the creators admitted took them by surprise.

    Webcomics 
  • In Homestuck, male God Tier outfits range from the basic t-shirt and pants of the Heir outfit to the absolutely humiliating codpiece-centred Bard. Female outfits range from the tomboyish Thief outfit (which Meenah still complains about and refuses to wear whenever possible) to the Sylph's elegant dress.
  • In addition to often ripping on Liquid and Raven's habits of not wearing shirts, The Last Days of FOXHOUND takes a good jab at the unit's, erm, "casual" dress-code by explaining that Sniper Wolf actually wore a normal outfit until someone shrank it in the wash, preventing her from zipping it up and forcing her to wander around showing off half her bust. Meryl, having previously been chastized for not wearing a balaclava because of her hair, is not amused:
    Meryl: She's dressed like that... and you're gonna yell at me about my hair?

    Web Videos 
  • In Allison Pregler's reviews of Charmed, this becomes a Running Gag to the point where all of the later seasons have a "Horrible Phoebe Phasion" segment. Lupa even puts them together into a Montage in the final video.
  • Linkara calls out Star Trek: Insurrection for this in his crossover with The Nostalgia Critic, because the Baku look identical to humans and even dress exactly like human beings:
    Linkara: And on top of that, the original series got away with people who looked exactly like humans because it was a low-budget '60s TV series. This is a multi-million-dollar movie! Buy some damn forehead bumps or something!

    Western Animation 
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • The normally fashion-conscious Rarity gets butterfly wings that quickly go to her head during "Sonic Rainboom," which leads to her entering the Best Young Fliers' Competition in heavy make-up and a gaudy Carnival dancer outfit. There is some logic behind it as it's meant to be noticeable by the in-universe audience who are watching from far away, but the poor viewers in real life are forced to get up close and personal with it.
    • The outfits that the Royal Sisters wear to Twilight's coronation in "Magical Mystery Cure" have been criticized for having rather tacky designs. Luna's dress is a shade of purple that clashes with the rest of her design, while the crescent moon on her crown has an unfortunate resemblance to a banana. Meanwhile, the swirling pattern on Celestia's dress looks more appropriate for a curtain or rug, and the crown she's wearing instead of her usual tiara is absurdly massive. A fan comic had a ball with this.
    • The pony's Rainbow Power forms took some criticism due to looking like the designer just made their manes larger and then threw sparkles and extra colors at them. This was clearly a Merchandise-Driven move, but the actual Rainbow Power toys have far more subdued designs, and the only time Rainbow Power's even been mentioned since is for a brief gag where it's brought up to annoy an evil clone of Twilight Sparkle.
    • The designs of Twilight's friends post-Time Skip in the show's final episode, "The Last Problem", are disliked due to having exaggerated eye bags, making them look too old given how much time has passed.
  • In SpacePOP, Rhea invokes this to some degree with her steampunk-inspired clothing, but the pinks and purples contrast terribly with the blue of her outfit, hair, and body, while the blue also doesn't contrast enough with the rest of her to stand out. Her princess outfit is just as bad, with the contrasting purples and pinks mixing with the blue of her shirt, her leggings being solid blocks of blue, and her heels being way too high.

    Real Life 
  • The definition of "fashion" (at least in the context of "the fashion industry" and "fashion shows") seems to be "wearable modern art that no actual person would be caught dead wearing."
    • Some designers have admitted that their work is intended for and looks best on hangers, not on people. This is called "haute couture." Fashion is a more watered-down, more affordable version of the same thing with saner makeup, and sizes meant for people that aren't fashion models (who are infamously thin).
  • Two U.S Military digital camouflage patterns have received criticism for being this.
    • The first is the Universal Camouflage Pattern, commonly known as UCP or ACUPAT. Criticism is mostly leveled at the pattern's inability to camouflage the wearer in anything other than an urban environment (or, it would seem, tacky couches). The Army started issuing uniforms in the Operational Camouflage Pattern, based on the more terrain-appropriate Multicam Arid Pattern to front line troops in 2015, although the UCP is still worn at home.
    • The second is the Navy Working Uniform. While Desert and Woodland variants exist, this blue one is intended to be worn aboard a ship. Most point out it would only serve to disguise the wearer in water. This is a bad thing if the wearer, say, falls overboard. That said, the concept of the camo is more to hide stains from engine grease and other such things instead of sailors.
      • They were also to help sailors look like they were actually in the Military, as opposed to wearing repurposed prison uniforms (as in, the uniforms the prisoners wore) that they replaced.
      • The NWU also presented a much more practical, serious case of this trope, as the nylon cotton blend used for the Type I (Blue) uniforms was significantly more flammable than other modern military uniforms, a serious problem in the case of any shipboard fires or explosions.
  • Ask any member of the Canadian Armed Forces about the CADPAT boot, and they'll either burst out laughing or not have any clue what you're talking about. This is because the CADPAT boot was such an abysmal failure it was discontinued after it's earliest preliminary testing and only a handful of soldiers ever received them. CADPAT is short for Canadian Disruptive Pattern and is the name of the camouflage worn by the CAF, and it being very effective (to the point the US Marines MARPAT is based on it) someone actually decided to put this same design on their boots. It's bad enough it made soldiers look like they were wearing a onesie, but the pattern would quickly begin to crumble off in a matter of weeks.
  • Princess Diana's poofy, over-elaborate wedding dress was fawned over when she married Prince Charles, but allegedly, she herself despised it. And with the arrival of Kate Middleton's wedding dress among other things, there have been big detractors of her dress in this day and age.
    • And then there was the hat Princess Beatrice wore to William and Kate's wedding. It got so much attention, its sheer ridiculousness almost stole Kate's thunder.
  • The '70s was an era that American car fans would rather forget as it featured some of the most neutered designs in both the engineering and especially the designing departments. While the early part of the 70s wasn't bad, it was only after 1973 that quality and appeal took a major nosedive and not until 1983 did cars started looking and performing cool again. Garish cars after 1973 were so aplenty that it is hard to include all of them without scratching your eyes out. Notable examples include the AMC Pacer, the Chrysler Imperial LeBaron, and the Ford Mustang II.

 
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Alternative Title(s): What The Hell Costuming Department, WTH Makeup Department

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Critic laughs at Steel's Suit

The Nostalgia Critic bursts out laughing when Shaq's Superhero outfit is finally revealed in the film Steel. Simply put, it looks utterly ridiculous and is impossible to take seriously, and on top of that its obviously made of rubber rather than metal, which makes it look even more lame.

How well does it match the trope?

4 (15 votes)

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