Poliwag

In March 2018, there was a throwaway line in the movie Love, Simon about dressing as "sexy Pokemon" - Irvin took that to heart, and decided then and there to make that his Halloween costume, hitting two fandoms with one cosplay.  After perusing the Pokemon, he settled on Poliwag.

For the sake of comfort and adjustability to weather conditions, Irvin forsook the original idea of a blue bodysuit, and went with separate blue clothing pieces.  The tricky part was Poliwag's tail, which has a gradient of colors, and needed to be light enough to wear on a belt while maintaining its shape.  In the end, a mix of packing pillows and thick white paper was encased in fabric, which was glued to wire hangers painstakingly molded into the tail.  Gravity, which interferes with all of Irvin's best costume ideas, didn't adversely affect this one - thanks to the resourcefulness of Irvin's cosplay consultant, Deanna.  Beyond that, it was just a question of different colors of makeup, and doing one's best not to smudge the spiral.

People older than Irvin's generation didn't quite get it, and Irvin was immensely entertained by the increasingly wild guesses as to whom he was supposed to be.  Several times, he had to correct people who thought he was Poliwag's evolution, Poliwhirl - but Poliwhirl has no tail, and the spiral goes the other way.  Irvin would tell people, "That's what I'm gonna be when I grow up!"  But a sizable number of people figured out that it was a Poliwag, and were quite enthralled by it - no one had ever seen a Poliwag costume before!