Children costumes show off girls' midriff. Google Image.

What Crosses the Line for Sexy Halloween Costumes?

Today’s fashion for young women has become increasingly provocative with trends pushing suggestive and slinky. Over the past couple decades, Halloween spirit has evolved from spooky and modest to   seductive and grandiose.

Traditional Halloween costumes originated from the spooky spirit may include witches, vampires, pumpkins, skeletons, ghosts and other creepy supernatural characters. But over time, costume selections have progressed to imitations of popular TV personalities, fictional characters, general subcultures (such as hippies), and “naughty” nurses and firefighters.

 Typical costumes today include sexy versions
 of pirates, creepy movie characters
 and uniforms.
 Google Image.

Political figures and pop culture inspire silly costumes for men and sexy for women. Pop stars, such as Britney Spears, have prompted women to steer toward a more racy approach to the holiday. Halloween has become a competition of outdoing everyone by wearing the sexiest, silliest or most unique costume.

Halloween costumes today for women, often formfitting, erotic and irrelevant to the original concept of the holiday, contrast with costumes from earlier decades, which included princesses, hippies, superheroes, witches, vampires and so on.

A flashback of Halloween in the '80s. Google Image.

I asked a psychology professor at my school what costume culture was like for Halloween in her day.

“I was a beatnik in the late ‘60s,” she said. “Back then costumes were more conventional. Popular costumes were ghosts and witches, and more conservative [than today]. It wasn’t about being provocative, but more about having fun.”

Since Halloween trends in this generation now follow mainstream culture, they tend to be over the top and give women an opportunity to emulate their favorite celebrity or turn an average job uniform into a slinky, flirtatious version. As provocative styles become more conventional, it is difficult to determine what “crosses the line” on a holiday that allows one to dress as unconventional they wish.