Editor’s Note: Delving into the archives of pop culture history, “Remember When?” is a CNN Style series offering a nostalgic look at the celebrity outfits that defined their eras.
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If Halloween had a fashion handbook, the party scene from the 2004 classic “Mean Girls” would take up a whole chapter. Twenty years have passed since the original Plastics stomped their kitten heels into movie history, but the (now, rather outdated) observation Lindsay Lohan’s outcast-turned-”it girl” Cady Heron makes about “girl world” neatly summarizes the dichotomy of dressing for this most confusing of holidays.
“In girl world, Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress up like a total slut and no other girls can say anything else about it.”
In the movie, of course, Cady learns this far too late. Rocking up to a house filled with the cool kids from school, she makes a crucial early 2000s teenage girl error: Wearing a super spooky costume for a super spooky holiday.
Donning fake teeth, a poofy wedding dress and veil, and just enough face paint to look totally deranged, Cady attends — not as a “zombie bride,” as her crush Aaron Samuels guesses — but an ex-wife.
“Why are you dressed so scary?” her popular friend Karen Smith gasps when she sees her. Karen may have been borderline illiterate in the movie, but she still got the memo and stuck some mouse ears on top of a black negligee.
Cady mumbles through her bloodied gums, “It’s Halloween?”
And thus, the two extremes of the Halloween costume spectrum were given name: In 2004, you were either a sexpot with “some form of animal ears” or an undead hag. (Of course, this didn’t apply to men. Aaron arrives to the party dressed as generic football player guy and still scores with the ladies.)
Times have changed. But as the over-sexified energy of the early 2000s has somewhat chilled, the ghosts of the sexy mouse and the ex-wife still haunt some young women every autumn. Like an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, they whisper:
Be sexy! — No, be a bog witch! — Appeal to the male gaze! — No, hex them all!
In the two decades since “Mean Girls,” came out, the Halloween costume spectrum has filled with more choice — and a lot of creativity.
Take Heidi Klum, who has made a sport of debuting crazier and crazier costumes every October. In 2002, the model dressed up as fictional bombshell Betty Boop by donning a black, curly wig and figure-hugging red dress. By 2022, she was a disturbingly lifelike worm — breaking a part of the sexy-scary scale forever. Conversely, sexy can also be served with a healthy layer of irony, assuming “sexy” means very tiny pieces of clothing. The apparel company Yandy, a mecca for Halloween costumes since 2007, has perfected the art of making people think, “Oh no, am I attracted to this?” with an extensive lineup of racy (insert literally any noun here) getups. Hot this year? A figure-hugging Stanley Cup costume.
At the same time, being a haunted bog witch has never been hotter. Dressing up sexy for Halloween has been going on for decades, but more people also seem to be embracing alternative aesthetics for the season. “Hot Girl Summer” now gives way to “Spooky Girl Fall,” and a lot of women can’t be bothered to add platform heels to a sexy taco costume when there are warm potions to sip and arcane rituals to perform.
That makes Cady Heron’s ex-wife of Frankenstein costume even more of a classic. In the original 2004 movie, Queen Bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams) steps out in a bang-on Playboy Bunny outfit. In the 2024 movie musical, Regina (Reneé Rapp) picks a dramatic, yet less revealing look that resembles an elaborate bird of prey. The movie’s costume designer Tom Broecker says the change highlights the lethal cunning that lurks below the character’s beauty.
“We knew that with Reneé’s version of Regina, the Playboy Bunny (costume) — the sexuality of it just didn’t seem current,” the movie’s costume designer Tom Broecker told Buzzfeed.
And yet, 2024 Cady still shows up with horrifying dentures and a ballooning white taffeta; a zombie bride among a sexy version of Joan of Arc, a husk of corn, and still — many animals.
Maybe that’s another lesson for the Halloween handbook. Sexy comes and goes, but scary and off-putting is forever.