When Did Halloween Get So Sexy?

Remember that time you begged your mom to sew you a witches costume, you know, the one that fully covered your body. (I was six I believe.)

Or that year that you could actually afford buying a costume and went as Barney. (No, that never happened, but I’m sure someone did it.) Again, fully covered.

And then something happened between high school and college and your new options became Naughty Librarian, Sexy Princess Leia and Sexy (Enter Superhero’s Name) here. Because it’s 80 degrees on October 31, ya’ll. (Actually, it was snowing this morning in Chicago, which is throwing a wrench in a lot of barely there visions.)

When did Halloween get so sexy?

If there’s anything relevant that Lindsey Lohan has said, it might be her quip from Mean Girls when she quoted Halloween as “the one night of the year when you can dress like a slut and no other girls can say anything about it.” I hate saying it, but she’s kind of right.

Before Halloween became about candy corn and face paint, people gathered to pray for the dead. Fun times. As it evolved into including costumes, (you can thank the Victorian’s for that) the ghouls and goblins came out. But it wasn’t until the 1970’s post sexual revolution that sexy got involved. Many historians point to the Halloween parades that took place in the gay communities, notably New York City’s Greenwich Village as the source — costumes became more eccentric and revealing. More than thirty years later, with cultural evolutions like Playboy and blockbuster icons like Catwoman, we’ve continued the tradition. Our attention to booties hasn’t helped either.

But, the sexy costume during Halloween isn’t just about an excuse to play dress-up and flaunt our goods.  The mystique of Halloween as a night where rules are allowed to be broken allows us to publicly address our wild sides and role-play for a night. On some level, we all want to be the objects of desire and showing lots of skin seems to do the trick.

Happy Halloween!