The Daily Swarm

UPDATE: Winners announced here.

UPDATE: Check out the first round of photos submitted.

What’s the next best thing to hopping on a plane to Mexico City to see one of Daft Punk’s last North American stops on the Alive 2007 tour on October 31? How about dressing up as Daft Punk for Halloween? We know you’re thinking about it, googling “Daft Punk Helmets” or “Daft Punk Masks” and salivating over the possibility of picking up an original pair for $65,000 (even though they’re absolutely not for sale) or wishing that that Alterian Inc., the special effects studio that Daft Arts used for the “Technologic” video and Electroma, had been more proactive in making an actual outfit commercially available. But making your Halloween wish come true is going to take some creative thinking and crafty skills.

For one idea, we asked the Daily Swarm reader Traci Kaye, a fashion designer at Foley + Corinna, for some advice on how to make a Daft Punk helmet on the cheap and she came up with a fantastic possibility, one-upping us by making it a full-body costume. For simplicity’s sake, Traci chose the summer concert encore version of Daft Punk for her costume design, and once she got past the idea of homemade fiber optics, the final outfit came together pretty fast.

The supplies were cheap and easy to find…all it took was some gloves, a leather jacket, standard rave-issue glow sticks (short and long, purchased in tubes of 50 each), Krazy Glue, velcro, and a helmet. The most expensive piece was the helmet itself: she bought a low-end motorcycle helmet from New York’s Vespa store for (a discounted) $50, though similar priced ones can be found all over the internet. Assembly was pretty self-explanatory, though Traci’s ingenious trick was to Krazy Glue those little plastic connectors to the helmet itself so that new glowsticks can be inserted as the old ones run out of juice (approximate glow time is 7 hours). Snip, glue, snap, insert and voila: music sounds better with you.

Clearly this is only one way to be Daft Punk this Halloween, and there’s plenty of people out there with greater technical skills and financial resources than us, so we’re running the Daily Swarm Daft Punk Halloween Costume Contest the find the best one. All you have to do to enter is send a photo of you (and your partner, if applicable) rocking out in your robot finest, along with your name and phone number, to daftpunkcostume-at-thedailyswarm-dot-com. We’ll post some of the best ones and our team of Daft Punk experts will pick four winners (or two pairs). And yeah, we’ve got some prizes. We’ll send each winner a copy of the Daft Punk Alive 2007 CD that’s coming out in November, plus a very special collector’s item bonus for hardcore DP fans: an original mint condition copy of the flyer for Even Furthur 1996, the Wisconsin rave where Daft Punk made their first-ever North American appearance. Send your photos in by Nov. 5. May the funk be with you.

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