by Lauren Lane
Staff Writer
Growing up, everyone was always so excited when October would roll around. October meant autumn was finally here, with the sound of crunching leaves and a month-long buildup to every child’s favorite fall holiday: the candy-packed Halloween night.
Speaking only from my personal experience, I would start making a list of the potential costumes I could dress up as for this beloved holiday around the middle of summer. It would start huge, around at least 50 different ideas, and end with five around the first week of October.
Popular costume choices were devil, witch, clown, angel, and princess. These five shaped most of my childhood Halloweens. Once I finally landed on an absolute decision my mom, sister, and I would make an annual trip to Jo-Ann fabrics to pick out the patterns and fabrics to customize the costume to our exact specifications, then my mom would spend her spare time for the next week crafting the costumes.
This was a big event in my family and my life. It was a nice bonding moment for us and I look back fondly on the memories even though my mom has not helped me with a costume in years.
When the big day would finally roll around my sister and our friends would meet at our house and start going around from house to house seeing who could bag the most candy and the biggest bars, always making sure to avoid the raisins and dental floss from the dentist down the street.
When our planned-out routes were all covered we would return to my house and dump out the massive amounts of candy on the floor and procede to organize and trade to optomize our respective candy hauls.
I miss those times, where the planning was about how awesome your mom can make your costume or how many full sized candy bars you can snag before the end of the night.
Being in college now it creates a whole ordeal. Halloween is now a two-weekend, or weeklong adventure for the brave. Parties, bar crawls, and multiple creative costumes all have to be planned, and if you aren’t either wearing a hilariously original or provocative costume, you lose at Halloween.
I just want to know where in time everything changed, not only in each of us to stop thinking about candy and start optomizing cleavage, but also in the years when it went from casually funny costumes to, well, this trend of “less is better” we have now.
I want to put out a disclaimer before I dive in: I have in fact dressed in a not-so-respectable manner on Halloween before, so I am not saying I am perfect or that I don’t play the college Halloween game, nor is my intention to be a hypocrite.
While deciding what I wanted to say in this article, I Googled “slutty halloween costumes.” While I know I was basically shooting myself in the foot with the wording of my Google search, I went forward anyway. My search results were absurd. The options ranged from the typical sexy bunny and sexy cop to the completely insane sexy frostbitten costume and the sexy panda bear baby costume.
I spent a good hour on the website looking at the costumes and trying to understand why a panda bear cub would be sexy, or an Eskimo with huge fluffy boots and hood, but only wearing the equivilent to spandex boy shorts and a bra.
Beyond the fact that these costumes seemed not only cold, uncomfortable, and just straight up weird, they are incredibly expensive. In the picture below the costume comes with “four pieces” and costs $126.99 for one night. Think about how much you could buy with that.
The flapper dress I wore in 2012 I bought for $30 freshman year and wore freshman and junior year (yes I am an outfit repeater) was an expense that earned its keep. However, $127 is enough to cover all of the utilities and cable from this summer, just to put it in perspective for you.
“I’m not really a fan of the skimpy dressers on Halloween. Honestly, without sounding mean, they make me feel like all they want is attention and are going to be needy and annoying. I don’t roll that way. If you wear something cute or hilarious, I will be way more likely to come up and talk to you or buy you a drink because it shows you have self respect and are funny as hell. I don’t know I guess I think more girls should do stuff like that,” said a male Boston University student. And he is not the only one to feel this way.
“The girl in the bra and thong with fishnet stockings really has nothing else to show. We’ve seen 98% of her body and her personality, even if she didn’t mean to show that. There’s no fun in hunting a dead deer, and definitely no surprise,” said AskMen.com
Beyond the fact that these costumes are uncomfortable, if you’re trying to find a guy for more than a few hours, chances are you’re not going to. Obviously I’m not a guy, but based on the testionials that I found and was told, the sexy octopus costume with about five inches of fabric is not the way to go.
When I think about the patterns my mom used to use to make costumes for my sister and me, there were always adult-sized patterns as well, and it might be because I was five, or because they didn’t exist, but I never remember seeing such tiny costumes like we have now.
Some were cute, but not over- the-top sexy, and still made you stand out. I’m not saying you need to sew your own costume, but use the ideas of the past not the odd options of the present.
From Robin Thicke, Miley Cyrus and her giant stuffed bear from the Video Music Awards, to a cereal killer, to a third wheel, there is no end to the creative aspect Halloween can bring. You don’t need to wear nothing to have a great time. In fact, I’ve found that when friends do something funny, I remember it more and overall it’s a better night than if we all wear tiny skirts and heels.
No matter what you decide to wear, I think we should all start to get back to what the true meaning of Halloween is: scaring the crap out of our friends and self-inducing candy comas for days.
