Dressing up on Halloween

The most popular contemporary venue for costuming and disguise in the masquerade and fancy dress traditions is Halloween. This ritual but informal festival has become a representation of North Americanness, both for new immigrants and in places where North American culture is transplanted and marketed. Halloween has transcended its ethnic roots, appropriating and transforming some of its aspects but reinventing and creating new referents for a great many others. While the date of 31 October is a fixture in the calendar, the way in which Halloween has been marked has had a very fluid nature without official origin or sanction, though by the twenty-first century, it has definitely been appropriated by commercial interests.

In mid-nineteenth-century North America, the observation of Halloween was thought to be the prerogative of first-generation Irish or Scottish immigrants. Middle-class families may have practiced contemporary versions of ancient divinatory rituals at home in their parlors, but for lower-class men, the event was marked by pranks outside the home and in the streets. Some form of disguise, perhaps as simple as smearing soot or burnt cork on the face, may have been part of the ritual as it had been with entertainments such as Mardi Gras, but it did not bear similarities to the fancy dress vogue that coexisted alongside it. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, college and university students used the evening for pranks, which had some impact in adding the holiday to the North American cultural calendar as well as its associations with youthful exuberance and rowdiness. By the turn of the century, most places in North America had rid themselves of festivals that inspired raucous behavior by outlawing them, institutionalizing them with parades, or domesticating them entirely. It followed that Halloween, as a final holdout of transgression on the margins of mainstream commemorative practices, would invigorate older traditions of masking as they became more circumscribed elsewhere.

Through the very early twentieth century and by the 1920s, at the height of the civic pageantry craze, fancy dress parties or more structured street parades had become an optional way for both children and adults to mark the evening of 31 October. The icons of bats, black cats, witches, and goblins, as well as the traditional colors of orange and black, were well in place and commercialized by this time, and they were featured in the Dennison Crepe Paper Company’s Bogie Book, first published in 1909. The commercial importance of Halloween thus became established. Through the interwar years, while civic organizations were behind an increasing number of structured Halloween celebrations, which often included fancy dress competitions, these did not serve to eliminate or reduce the pranks and public mischief as was hoped. The tension between the fancy dress carnivals being promoted as family entertainment and the anarchic aspect of the entertainment appropriated by adolescents led to a popular misconception that a children’s holiday was being overtaken by adults and adolescents.

The children’s trick-or-treating ritual as it is known today was introduced in the late 1930s, but it really did not gain momentum and wide acceptance until the 1950s, transforming Halloween into a rite of consumption and giving it strong retail potential. Children’s Halloween costumes were produced in increasing number and variety by manufacturers over the course of the century. As the entertainment industry grew, characters inspired by television, movies, and particularly the frightening Halloween Hollywood movie genre became part of the repertoire.

By the 1970s, Halloween as a children’s celebration, characterized by costumed trick-or-treating, had become entrenched in North American mass culture. Simultaneously, Halloween has gradually been appropriated by adults, whose participation is driven by retail and leisure industries. Halloween dressing up by adults is usually used as an unstructured means of parody. Because of the outlet for transgression Halloween provides, in many urban areas, gay cultures have used Halloween costumed parades and parties as reaffirmation. Halloween at the end of the millennium has become an event for adults, with an estimated 65 percent of North American adults participating beyond just giving out candy to children.

 - the above article was supplied to us from our pals at the Berg Fashion Library. You can read the full article, jam packed with info about the history of masquerade dress here. Here are some literary fancy dress ideas to get you thinking! (sadly, I couldn't find any female ones on google outside of the 'sexy Alice in Wonderland' category :( but I'm sure I'm sure that it wouldn't be too difficult to whip up a Cathy from Wuthering Heights – scary long dark hair, white nightgown, fake blood... and of course Miss Havisham - a character made for Halloween!)

    

Comments

[Animal suits]

You can go as so many things for Halloween, there won't be any lack of options when you're talking about a costume because there's just so many of them. The last thing you want is an unoriginal idea though, that can really spoil the moment.

[Julie]

Thanks for sharing this, very informative.