As people grow older, Halloween looks less like a haunted house and more like a runway show, and somewhere between the time of playing with dolls and taking the perfect Instagram photo, the meaning of the holiday was transformed.
As kids, when the spooky season began, everyone was on the edge of their seats trying to find the best costumes. From ghosts and zombies to witches and vampires, having the coolest and scariest outfit was the priority. However, in recent years, the focus of Halloween has changed. Instead of trick-or-treating, most teens find themselves attending parties, hanging out with friends, and posting their outfits on social media.
“For me, it’s not really about being scary anymore. When I was younger, it was more about being the scariest person, and now I just focus on whatever looks good. I feel like we kind of lost the point of it,” said Shaqed Krupnik, a Carlmont junior.
Common outfits for teenage girls include animals, movie characters, Victoria’s Secret angels, singers, and much more. Often, people will take a regular costume and put the word “sexy” in front of it, as almost everything can be styled to become more revealing.
“When we were younger, we dressed up as whatever. If you wanted to be a princess, you would buy the princess costume from Spirit Halloween. If you want to be a princess now, you buy an Amazon corset and bloomers,” said Isabella Michael, a Notre Dame Belmont senior.
This large shift in childhood costumes compared to today doesn’t happen naturally. Social media plays a significant role.
“When you scroll on TikTok, obviously it’s Halloween season, so there are a lot of videos about people posting their cute outfits and costumes, not scary ones, but their party outfits; that makes me want to dress up like them,” Krupnik said.
The idea of Halloween being more about appearance isn’t new. In the popular movie “Mean Girls,” which came out in 2004, the main character, Cady, shows up to a Halloween party wearing a scary costume with fake teeth, blood, and a full-length wedding dress. Everyone else at the party was wearing short skirts, small tops, and polished makeup. She was unaware of the unspoken rule of high schoolers wearing sexy outfits on Halloween and ended up feeling embarrassed and out of place.
This culture shock is a shared experience among many teenagers, as many people conform to social expectations in order to fit in. Especially in high school, the desire for acceptance is stronger than at any other time period in someone’s life.
“You get influenced by other people doing a specific costume, and then when everybody starts dressing this type of way, it influences you to do it,” said Anna Bernadi, a Carlmont sophomore.
While going to parties, squeezing into tight shirts, and piling on mountains of hairspray is the norm now, most people forget about the time in their lives when their hearts would race from the excitement of going door to door, hoping for the biggest candy bars, and having no worry about how they looked. But for some, the thought of Halloween night never being the same is difficult.
“I kind of like the spooky side of it, and I really enjoyed trick or treating when I was younger, but now it’s not there. I kind of miss it, and I’m not getting the same vibe anymore. I wish it were about the scariness again,” Bernadi said.
