by Ava Stringer ’28 on October 30, 2025
Opinion
By mid-October, Providence College transforms into the most quintessential collegiate New England atmosphere imaginable. The air smells faintly of pumpkin spice and apple cider. Halloween brings carved pumpkins glowing on porches, the same orange as the dying leaves. Nevertheless, it’s the Amazon Prime boxes stacked in the mailroom that really announce the season. We don’t celebrate Halloween anymore; we survive Halloweekend. Or, in a particularly cruel twist, Halloweekends—plural. Two full weekends, three nights each week, countless bar crawls, dorm parties, and themed “darties” that demand a small fortune’s worth of costumes.
Five distinct outfits. One backup “iconic” look. A prayer that one of them photographs well enough on a digital camera to justify the chaos.
Yik Yak insists you need multiple costumes. TikTok Shop offers identical links, and suddenly, everyone clicks “add to cart” like it’s a moral obligation. The result? A polyester parade. A sea of synthetic superheroes and viscose vampires, all sourced from the same fast-fashion empires we dramatically vowed to boycott last semester after that ethics lecture on sweatshops. Apparently, righteous outrage expires in next-day shipping.
Somewhere between the group chat polls, the Shein tracking updates, and the, “Should I be a fairy or a Formula One driver” crises, Halloween lost its sense of mischief. It used to be about the joy of mayhem, grabbing a pair of scissors, and seeing what happened. Now it’s an industrial process. The efficiency of consumerism has killed the thrill of chaos.
And let’s talk about money. We’re all allegedly broke, living off Ray omelets and swearing we’ll Venmo friends for Uber rides. Yet we somehow manage to funnel our last $200 into costume essentials. Wigs, fishnets, fake blood, angel wings, maybe a corset if your favorite influencer insists. The cost of pretending to be someone else for four nights straight could fund an actual vacation, or at least a month’s worth of iced coffees. And for what? To repeat the ritual next year when the trends change again?
Even the so-called unique costumes aren’t safe. Everything that once felt niche or clever is now mass-produced and micro-trended to death. Let me guess this year’s lineup for the chronically online: Sabrina Carpenter, Glinda and Elphaba duos, a Labubu, maybe the Louvre heist guys, or Hugh Jackman with his loaves of bread. The irony is that in trying so hard to stand out, everyone ends up looking exactly the same.
The desperation to be perceived as hot, funny, ironic, or different has swallowed the fun whole. We curate our costumes like resumes, hoping they’ll perform well online. Halloween used to be about imagination; now it’s about optics. Nobody’s asking, “What do I want to be”? They’re asking, “What will get the most likes”?
I spent this weekend in Salem, MA, which, to its credit, still knows how to do Halloween properly. There, people wore handmade cloaks and crocheted witch hats. They looked genuinely delighted, not desperate for validation. It reminded me that Halloween used to reward creativity, not overconsumption. There’s something almost radical now about not buying anything new, about showing up in something weird, handmade, or borrowed, and wearing it like you mean it.
Maybe the most original costume this year is the one that doesn’t come with a tracking number. Because honestly? The scariest thing about Halloween 2025 isn’t the ghosts or the ghouls. It’s the credit card bill that follows.