Easter in Berlin means stores stuffed with candy-colored eggs and chocolate bunnies and streets full of pastel-dipped churchgoers. More than a day, this holiday marks the beginning of longer days, budding trees, and a pace shift in the city as parties move outdoors, the bump of speakers starts to reverberate from parks, and leaving your house doesn’t require multi weatherproof layers. Like the self-sacrificing weeks of Lent, Berlin winter comes with its own deprivations: vitamin D, sunlight, and warm weather. This Easter falls on the same day as Daylight Savings Time, granting an extra hour to the already long weekend and anticipates the sunny days and warm nights of summertime. Spring is here, and Easter calls up images of cute baby animals and sunshine and flowers as the city comes to life again.
Just as much as it is a celebration of rebirth, Easter is also a holiday of impersonation: lamb shaped cakes, trees strung with painted eggs instead of fruit, plastic molded to look like an egg and filled with other chick and rabbit and carrot-shaped candies. And like the religious motif of bread and wine becoming body and blood, a spirit also possesses the Easter Bunny, who delivers baskets of gifts to children who behave during the weeks leading up to the holiday. In recent years, the innocent bunny has come into new forms, as costume designers turn the cute animals into sexy costumes or scary monsters. In keeping with the tradition of personification and with the anthropomorphic symbol of Easter, SLEEK has selected the 10 best bunny costumes in movie and pop culture history.
Image courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
Regina George in Mean Girls (2004)
With spinoffs, sequels, a Broadway musical interpretation and a coming 2024 remake, Mean Girls has clearly never left the collective cultural consciousness. There’s something about the decades old formula of super hot actors playing out the dramas of insecure, hormonal teenagers, hitting the mark between cringe and seductive, that was perfected in Mean Girls. Beyond the execution of a predictable Cinderella love plot inverted to a MacBethian power struggle, Mean Girls impressed as a paradigm of y2k hot-girl outfits: shrunken hoodies, pleated mini skirts, and pastel tank tops. Some of the best outfits come from the Halloween scenes, the popular girl look peaking with Regina’s sexy bunny outfit. White bodysuit, fur topped boots, fluffy cuff bracelets, and a puffball tail make this one of Regina’s best looks.
Image courtesy of Flower Films.
Donnie Darko in Donnie Darko
Another movie villain appears as a rabbit in a very different form— Frank the Rabbit in psychological horror movie Donnie Darko. The film follows another troubled teen, played by Jake Gyllanhal, who is visited in his sleep by a figure in a fur rabbit suit with a distorted silver face. The insidious rabbit tells Donnie that the world is going to end in 28 days, and continues to appear to him during episodes of sleepwalking, convincing him to flood the high school and burn down a neighbor’s house. Scenes flicker between the warm gradient of a 90s teen movie and the shadowy wash of a schizoid thriller, descending into a paranormal time-bending mania. This bunny costume is not the cutest, but its chrome plate details and twisted features will continue to inspire Halloween outfits for years to come.
Images courtesy of MGM and 20th Century Studios.
Elle Woods in Legally Blonde
In Legally Blonde a fun-loving sorority girl is thrown into the drab, colorless world of Harvard law school. From a life of beach volleyball, frat parties, and poolside tanning in sequined bikinis, Elle is suddenly surrounded by turtleneck and glasses wearing snobs, none of whom take her seriously. While she crams to keep up with the coursework, Elle never lets her personal style slip, forever showing up in an endless stream of sunglasses, high heels, berets, and pink sequins, pleather, silk, and fur. One of her most memorable outfits is from the house party scene when, invited by her ex’s new fiance, Elle is tricked into wearing a full on costume to a kick back. Lacy, fluffy, and of course, pink, Elle’s bunny costume is perhaps the best of the trope.
Image courtesy of Columbia Pictures.
Shelley Darlington in House Bunny
Anna Faris made her name in the 2000s irreverent comedy genre, almost always performing some variation of a ditzy blonde. Deciding to fully capitalize off of this character, Faris produced House Bunny, where she stars as Shelley Darlingson, a 27 year old orphan who has been kicked out of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. Losing the only home she’s ever known, Faris attempts to join a sorority as their “house mother”. Rejected by house after house, she finally gets stuck with the “loser” sorority that she helps to makeover, bringing in a higher budget, new pledges, and hot fraternity guys. Faris’s dumb blonde persona was outfitted by 90s costume designer Mona May (who worked on Clueless, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Enchanted), in the height of bimbo core: push up bras, mini skirts, tiny crop tops, glittery stilettos, and a bedazzled bunny outfit.
Image courtesy of Fine Line Features.
Bunny Boy in Gummo
Not all bunnies are cute, and not all small-town life is romantic. Harmony Korin’s debut film Gummo cast a dark light on the tornado-alley town Xenia in Ohio, and the mindless violence of its bored, poverty-stricken residents. Grossing less than 10% of its production costs in box office, Gummo became in later years a cult classic for misfit film bros and disturbed suburbanites. Shot on highway overpasses, in backyard pools, and unfinished basements, the scenes are colored by aimless kids in trashy summer-wear: basketball shorts, cutoff jackets, bleached hair and rollerskates. With costume direction by Chloe Sevingy, Gummo is a collection of things we tried to throw away but end up resurfacing from the basement— like the bunny ears that a nameless character wears throughout the movie.
Image courtesy of Working Title Films.
Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones Diary
Another victim to the “getting tricked into wearing a costume to a normal party”, Bridget Jones fully commits to her playboy bunny outfit, complete with silk cuffs, a coller, and fishnet tights. Bridget Jones Diary plays on a lot of tropes to tell the story of a single 30-something woman looking for love in all the wrong places, but the movie managed to produce a comfort classic that has become a genre of its own. The story of a frazzled working-woman clinging to her girlish hopes renders in a specific style: fuzzy sweaters, colorful scarves, and knee-high boots interspersed with lingerie and cocktail dresses, always with a cigarette in hand. Capturing her awkward but eager essence, Bridget’s best look might be the playboy bunny.
Image courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Ralphie in A Christmas Story
Born to adventure, Ralphie in A Christmas Story is forced to behave in his turbulent family home, throughout a series of vignettes centered around the chaos of the holiday season. While we are far from Christmas, this cozy classic remains a staple of the chillier holidays, depicting the rowdiness and mishaps of an old-time American childhood. Set in the 1930s, the 80s movie makes a timeless portrait of hometown life, drawing on a nostalgic pining for vintage interiors, bundled up marches to school, and snow covered front porches capping windows aglow with Christmas lights. Like any child gifted something humiliating that they’ll be forced to wear out of politeness, Ralphie glowers in his pajama bunny suit, that will soon be packed away until his aunt comes back to visit.
Image courtesy of Warner Bros. Television.
Chandler on Friends
The iconic show Friends has fed generations with a monolith of 90’s outfits, from Monica’s casual hotness in mom jeans and button ups to Rachel’s girl-next-door style to Phoebe’s boho, pattern mixing eccentricism. Men’s streetwear fashion also found its match in Ross, Chandler, and Joey’s sporty pullovers, graphic tees layered over long sleeve thermals, and baggy jeans. Chandler’s fuzzy pink bunny suit on a Halloween episode alongside Monica’s skin-tight cat costume has generated copy-cat couples costumes for all of the golden-retriever/ black cat duos.
Image courtesy of Bellweather Pictures.
Anya on Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy The Vampire Slayer is packed with outfit inspo from the early aughts, from preppy school girl style to the evil vampires’ punky studded belts and trench coats. Buffy’s style ranges over the course of a given episode from WASPy cardigans and floral tone mini skirts to platform shoes and leather pants, while her best friend Willow keeps up a whimsy goth look of maxi dresses, flowy blouses and graphic knitwear. Entering later in the show as a punishing, man-hating demon, Anya is yet another style guideline, with retro influences in her silk sleepwear, patchwork pattern sets, and 50s cut dresses. In a partial reveal of her Scandinavian childhood raising rabbits outside an isolated village, Anya shows up as a bunny to a party themed to dress as “something scary”. Her oversized bunny suit was replicated in collectible action figures for Anya’s character on the show.
Image courtesy of Absurda.
The Rabbit Family in The Rabbits
David Lynch has a very different vision for television, in his series of short horror films The Rabbits from 2002, which he refers to as a sitcom. Played by Scott Coffey, Laura Elena Harring and Naoimi Watts in giant rabbit costumes, the surrealist film collection depicts a small family settled in their living room after the “father” rabbit gets home from work. Pierced with a random, erratic laugh track, the rabbits speak without conversing, in mysterious, one-line non sequiturs. Like Lynch’s more famous show Twin Peaks, The Rabbits subverts the nostalgia and comfort of the American Dream life, and parodizes the genre of sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show. The rabbits, coming home from work in suit and tie or ironing in a bathrobe, exist both in the familiar, known format of the nuclear family and in the alien, disorienting world that Lynch created.