Editorial: Halloween costumes display more than just bodies

Students probably weren’t scouring slate.com to research Halloween trends on their rain-soaked, dreary Monday.

But on the website was an interesting column discussing a new trend in how people use search engines to find creative Halloween costumes this year.

Since about 2008, the frequency of the search term “sexy Halloween costume” has dropped by nearly 50 percent on Google and Yahoo. A survey by Savers Thrift Stores found that “about half of the women who dress up will do so as something ‘attractive.’” However, these statistics can truly speak to the trend of sexy dress each Halloween.

It’s interesting because Halloweeners still embrace the idea of dressing sexy when determining their costume. Very few people walked around Oakland last weekend dressed as an ex-wife, as did Lindsay Lohan in “Mean Girls.” Hundreds still went as sexy cats, sexy nuns and sexy fairies.

But we observed a more varied spectrum of costumes this year as well. While we have no statistics, our anecdotal observations conclude that sexy costumes took more forms than just cats, nuns and fairies this year. Sexy penguins and sexy taco packets were just as common.

What we noticed was an uptick in creative costumes. Moving beyond the now-familiar Halloween archetypes and perhaps more budget conscious than most years, students at Pitt showed higher levels of thought put into costumes.

This trend was not limited to women. Men took part too, attempting to bridge sexy and creative — albeit with much less force than women — with morphsuits and chippendale costumes.

This apparent transition to more creative costumes does not reduce the tendency of people to wear costumes that are sexy. People still like having the ability to show a bit more skin than they would normally. They enjoy taking the form of a different person because it allows them to feel like somebody else for a night.

But this newly discovered trend is important because it shows that people value wittiness as opposed to solely focusing on how someone’s body looks in tight fabric.

Perhaps we are just in love with ourselves.

But either way, the fact that men and women are no longer limiting themselves to sexy cat costumes is satisfying and positive.