What are you going as for Halloween? As that's the question so many people are asking right now, I thought it'd be fun to revisit the costumes of Halloweens past. So I asked a group of writers at various fashion-slanted blogs and magazines to share their first—or favorite—Halloween costumes. Here's what we got (some with bonus pictures!!!).

Leah Chernikoff, executive editor of Fashionista

My favorite Halloween costume was actually pretty recent. My sister lives in New Orleans where they do everything big so a few years ago we went all out to be the creepy twins from The Shining. We wore blood-stained matching Land's End school uniforms and [...]

The jack-o'-lantern traces its origins to the Dark Ages’ British Isles, where once upon a time, as oral histories convey, they were carved from turnips, illuminated with swamp gas and held aloft to protest the excesses of the financial elite. In sophisticated neighborhoods, the jack-o'-lantern has evolved into a tool for clever parents to send amusing political jokes to one another and to demonstrate their artisanal bona fides. The puking pumpkin simply won’t suffice anymore. A range of genius o'-lantern alternatives exists, but these mostly work indoors only. I’m going to show you how to design and carve a spirited jack-o'-lantern for your stoop that will shock and [...]

There are some words that should never be combined with “sexy.” “Clownfish,” for example. Yet the “Sexy Clownfish” costume is a hit at the Halloween superstore in my neighborhood. I’d like to meet the creative team that came up with that brilliant idea. Did they just pull words out of a hat and attach them to “sex?” A sexy clown would be terrifying and a sexy fish is… just gross, yet “Sexy Clownfish” gets the green light for production. Some stores market the sexualized fish as a grown-up “Nemo," but in the end it's just slutty get-ups modeled after a character popular with children. Just like provocative Cookie [...]

SCANDALIZING TANTALIZING NEWSWEEK COVER

Nothing makes a bigger splash than a daring headline, and nobody does daring like Newsweek! Whether it’s comparing liberals to terrorists or single mothers to other, angrier terrorists, you’re sure to get everyone’s blood boiling in this 100% recycled newsprint costume. Comes with swappable covers to maximize offense to whoever will be seeing you in it, and racy advertorial bustier that’ll really get his pages flipping.

$6.99. One size fits all, available for shipping to US only.

SO JEALOUS of this kiddo. Do enjoy this photo shoot of Kiddo Robocop tooling around Detroit. Maybe I don't actually want to poison children on Halloween! (via)

I've made it well-known that I'm not a huge fan of children. So now that parents have been lulled by science and journalism into finally believing that "there has never been a single case of any child being killed by a stranger's Halloween candy," I'm finally going to strike.

It's the spookiest website in the world, made up (stories about) of terror and spookiness!

Bride of Frankenstein was the very, very best of the Universal horror movies, because its director, James Whale, was as perverse as any mad scientist and as gentle as his monster. After the bride’s black hair is stood up on end and shot through with white, and after she screamingly rejects the monster’s plaintive pleas for friendship, and after he detonates the laboratory with both of them inside it, I turned off the big-box TV—this was years ago, when I was an emptier person living in an empty apartment in an empty city—and I lay there feeling lonesome and ugly instead of skittish and jumpy. I've never seen it since, [...]