Hippie costumes have always been the fashion statement of the counter culture. In the 1960s, when main stream society kept clean shaven in shirts and skirts, Hippie costumes were composed of army surplus clothing, combat boots, hair clogged stockings, and showers on Betty Friedan's birthday. As the oppression of women and minorities gained widespread awareness, Hippie costumes adopted the appearance of that greatest of threats to conservative America, Tonto. Nothing demands equality like the attire of an egregiously misnamed group of native inhabitants; take that white people! And, when the Vietnam War raged, Hippie costumes blossomed with the flower as their symbol of power. Hippie costumes, featuring pastel colored bell bottoms and flared pants, defied even the French to surrender to a group of people dressed, literally, like pansies.

50 years later, an odd confluence of cultural planets have aligned and breathed new life into Hippie costumes. For starters, the real hippies, yippies, freaks, and flower children, are all dying and leaving a legacy of empty bank accounts and wardrobes full of horrific clothing, the essential ingredient in Hippie costumes. The inheriting generation has been impoverished by the Great Recession, which has left us all in the earthen poverty the real hippies so romantically sought but quickly abandoned to become the Wall Street bond traders of the 1980s. And, as if in a stroke of divine providence, Johnny Depp is cast to play Tonto, in yet another remake of the Lone Ranger. So, if only for a day, flip fashion the free bird, let your freak flag fly, and break out your Hippie costume. Take up the old causes, which are now the new causes, which makes you counter-counter-cultural, or just cultured. Be anti-war, have safe sex for peace, go "green," eat "clean," reduce your carbon footprint to 10 toe-jammed dogs, slather yourself in petulie oil, gather your tribe, break out your menagerie of odds and thrift store ends, couple it with your best day glow bloomers, an Eagle feather, and kimosabe, you and your tribe will be styling the Hippie costume.