I’m A Mouse, Duh! The ‘Sexy’ Halloween Costume: Deconstructed
collage: @laurenelburns
IT’S A MILITANT OPERATION. I conjure up several outfits in my head weeks before, on the night I exchange frequent texts with my friends, and panic at least three times because nothing looks how I want it to and I simply can’t go out! Check Instagram to see what girls in my classes are wearing. Cringe over how my fake tan looks in the bleak light of my bedroom. OMG, my friend says. Jake’s girlfriend’s cousin is going as a French maid too! And so that’s it, I think. My life is practically o-ver.
‘In girl world, Halloween is the one time of year a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girl can say anything about it,’ said Lindsay Lohan’s Cady Heron in Mean Girls. I think we all, collectively, squeal as soon as we catch a glimpse of that long black wig. Oh, Cady, I think, pleaaaase don’t go to Chris Eisel’s Halloween Party like that! Flicking through social media towards the end of October will mean swathes of girls donned in the most Instagrammable costumes. Kendall Jenner as a Powerpuff Girl, Devon Windsor as a Playboy bunny. Halloween is an opportunity to get creative, to impress with your costume and express your fantasies. But when exactly did we ditch bedsheets for stockings – and when did the OG Halloween costume get so uncool?
The history of the Halloween costume dates back over two thousand years, a tradition rooted in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. The day marked the close of summer and harvest, the beginning of a dark and cold winter. On the 31st , it was widely believed that the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. Fashioned in costumes of animal heads and skins, individuals lit bonfires and dressed to ward off ghosts. As Lesley Bannatyne told CNN, it was seen as a day ‘outside of normal,’ ‘when you act outside of society’s norms’ (via CNN).
But it was when Halloween entered American culture that the costumes switched up. Outfits were fashioned at home with whatever was to hand, with anonymity as their focus. The whole point of dressing up was to be completely in disguise. People also chose to impersonate characters at the fringe of society, says fashion historian Nancy Deihl. Pirates, gypsies, and even homeless people became common outfit choices. The 1940s began to see Hollywood starlets dressed in fashionable cat and witch costumes, serving as reputation builders for actresses and studios. As time progressed, concealing one’s identity on Halloween became less popular. Instead, individuals opted for characters in popular culture – superheroes and television characters. While the ‘sexy’ Halloween costume wasn’t yet commonplace, women often dressed in elegant and glamorous clothing considered widely to be ‘exotic’ (via HuffPost).
Salacious is almost synonymous with fancy dress – with extravagant balls documented throughout history, particularly in French Court during the reign of Marie Antoinette. Cultural marketing experts have long discussed ‘enclothed cognition’, with costumes allowing an individual the freedom to transform into someone else – even if it’s only for the one night. The rise of the Playboy aesthetic in popular culture, prevalent throughout the 1990s and into the noughties, meant that Halloween costumes switched from ghosts in sheets to sexy nurses, firewomen, police officers. ‘Sexy costumes’ are among the most searched Halloween outfit terms, the holiday shifting largely from the masked affair that it once was. Celebrity costumes, particularly, have become iconic – take Britney and Justin’s 2001 American Music Awards double denim or Kim K’s Cher. The Halloween costume of today is, at its core, about having fun and dressing as you please – be it a sexy cat or Cady’s Corpse Bride.
I will likely lose count of the girls in slip dresses I see this year, carefully balanced bunny ears on their heads. I can imagine I’ll be one of them.
by Darcy Wolfe Jones
Follow Darcy’s Instagram
❀