The site now also hosts a costume called “ I’m a Mouse, Duh!” – a meta-riff off the classic Mean Girls gag: “Halloween is the one day a year when a girl can dress up like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”īut how exactly did Halloween become this One Day A Year, particularly as the word originally meant “Saints’ Evening”? Valerie Steele is a fashion historian and director of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology – in the past, the museum has hosted an exhibition of vintage Halloween costumes. “A good example would be we did some romper-style Care Bears for women, they’re cute with little shorts and they’re cheeky but they’re not overly sexy,” Frank explains. Frank says it can take as little as six months for a sketch to hit the shelves, though typically the process lasts around ten (Smiffy’s Morrish takes an average of just four months).įrank also works with licensors to create branded costumes – some are open to sexy outfits, some are not, others compromise. “The world’s your oyster,” she says.īelieve it or not, thousands of new Halloween costumes flood the market every autumn – Heather Frank, product design manager at HalloweenCostumes.com in Mankato, Minnesota, says her team can create up to 750 costumes in a single year. Her favourite costumes to design are space-themed as – compared to nurses and policewomen – there’s more room to play around. In 2010, when “there were no female zombie costumes on the market”, she transformed a sexy nurse into a sexy zombie nurse and created an instant bestseller. Morrish, who works in Leeds, says crop tops are in, and things have moved on from the “glamour model-esque” origins of the brand’s sexy costume range. “Three, four, years ago I would’ve never dreamt of doing a midriff-revealing costume,” says Savanna Morrish, a designer at 126-year-old costume manufacturer Smiffys, based in the Midlands. Ten years ago, the default sexy Halloween costume might’ve featured a big frilly skirt under a tight corset, whereas right now, sleek bodysuits are in. One thing that helps is a lot of the companies will make it so if you get witches one year, the next year you’ll get vampires.”ĭaniels explains that sexy Halloween costumes are more fashion-forward than many of us might think, and ranges are regularly relaunched to feature new fashion and colour trends. “Because every year you design the same 40 characters – there’s always witches, vampires, devils, pirates. “Yeah, that’s the question, right?” Daniels, who now works and lives in LA, says laughing. Who creates the world’s sexy Halloween costumes, and how do they come up with their ideas? How exactly did sexy Halloween costumes become so ubiquitous? Is there anything that can’t be sexified – and how do you put a new spin on a sexy vampire every single year? But though we regularly marvel at the models flaunting the costumes, we rarely stop and think about the designers behind them. Raunchy Halloween costumes are now so prevalent that even a list of the weirdest ( sexy lime wedge / sexy Play-Doh / sexy beer mug / sexy kangaroo) will hardly make you flinch. This year we’ve inevitably been treated to sexy hand sanitiser and sexy banana bread. Meanwhile, a red-capped politician named Donna T. In 2014, a “ Sexy Ebola Containment Suit” inspired headlines – a year later, a sexy green poo and charcoal burger costume celebrated a limited edition Burger King offering that apparently turned your effluent emerald. “Basically I’ll wake up and there’ll be an email in my inbox and my boss will say, ‘witches and vampires, GO’.”Įvery October, a new sexy Halloween costume, usually designed by an American company, goes viral. Her designs have appeared in Walmart, Target and Claire’s Accessories. “I remember walking in for the interview and there was Halloween stuff everywhere and I thought, ‘These people are weird’.” Daniels got the job, and for the last 10 years she’s been designing Halloween costumes – first as an employee, now as a freelancer. “By complete fluke I saw this ad for a Halloween costume designer,” Daniels says now.
Then, the company she was working for filed for bankruptcy. As a recent fashion graduate from San Francisco’s Academy of Art University, Daniels was in her element creating elegant dresses for high-end American retailers such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s while living in New York. In 2008, Desiree Daniels was designing evening gowns when the global financial crisis hit.