Hey,

Remember when Cady Heron showed up to the Halloween party in Mean Girls dressed as a genuinely terrifying zombie bride? Meanwhile, Karen was a mouse (duh), Regina was a bunny, and everyone else seemed to have received a very different dress code.

Cady dressed for Halloween.
Other girls dressed for Halloween and to look hot.

22 years later, that scene is still funny for a reason – we tell women they can be anything for Halloween. Then say: preferably something that still looks good in pictures. And that's what #Edition104 wants to talk about.

Inside this Edition:
👉 The Right to Look Ridiculous
🥗 What she's watching, exploring, trying
📰 Her World, This Week
✨ Her Spotlight
🤍 A Note to Her

Sometimes a girl just wants to be a giant worm. And frankly, who are we to stop her?

Somewhere out there, somebody is selling a sexy version of something that really, truly did not need one. A sexy nurse. A sexy pirate. A sexy skeleton. At this point, a sexy parking ticket doesn't seem entirely out of the question.

And… if Halloween is your excuse to wear thigh-high boots and glitter, wonderful.

But have you ever noticed how being attractive can feel like a requirement even when you're supposed to be pretending to be something else?

A 2016 study compared 124 pairs of men's and women's Halloween costumes. The women's versions tended to be tighter and more revealing. The interesting part isn't simply how much skin they showed. It's how differently we're encouraged to approach the whole assignment.

A man can turn up dressed as a giant hot dog, a badly constructed dinosaur, or an enormous traffic cone and be the funniest person in the room. Women can, too. But somewhere between choosing the costume and getting ready for the party, another question sometimes sneaks in: Okay, but will I look the part?

And I keep thinking about Heidi Klum. In 2022, she spent months preparing to attend her famous Halloween party as an enormous earthworm. Not a sexy worm. Not a glamorous reinterpretation of one. An actual, ‘disturbingly’ realistic worm. She told Vogue she wanted something absurd, creepy, and a little disgusting. And she absolutely delivered.

What I love about that moment isn't that Heidi rejected beauty. She's spent an extraordinary career celebrating and performing it. It's that, for one night, looking beautiful wasn't the point of the performance. She had another idea. And she followed it all the way into becoming a worm.

There's a particular freedom in that.

Women are often encouraged to be funny, interesting, daring, creative, even outrageous. But there's also the expectation to remain visually appealing while doing it.  And, Halloween makes that contradiction wonderfully obvious.

A holiday built around transformation can still leave women wondering whether their transformation is sufficiently flattering. And I don't think the answer is to start declaring ugly costumes more feminist than sexy ones. That would simply introduce another dress code.

The woman in a bunny costume might be having the time of her life. The woman dressed as a refrigerator might be, too. The freedom is in neither of them having to defend the choice.

So this Halloween, wear the corset. Wear the fangs. Be a glamorous vampire, a genuinely horrifying ghost, or an appliance nobody can immediately identify. And if your favorite costume idea has absolutely no waist definition, please don't abandon it on that account.

You spend enough of the year being looked at.
For one night, wouldn't it be wonderful to just have fun being something?

💬 Ideas to tune into when the world’s too loud.

🎬 WATCH: The Love Witch (2016)
A glamorous witch, disastrous love potions, fabulous eyeliner, and enough velvet to furnish a small castle. Anna Biller's darkly funny horror film looks straight out of 1960s Technicolor, with costumes and sets she helped create herself. Beautifully excessive, wonderfully strange, and very committed to the bit.
🎭 EXPLORE: Dressed for Thrills by Phyllis Galembo
A photographic rabbit hole of Halloween costumes from the past century. Costumes that look like somebody had a brilliant idea and absolutely no budget – Proof that Halloween was delightfully weird long before Pinterest got involved.
🍫 MAKE: Martha Stewart's Halloween Brownies
Rich chocolate brownies dressed up as mummies and spiderwebs, complete with candy eyeballs and icing bandages – the less respectable they look, the more Halloween-appropriate they become.

Earlier this October, we introduced HWD's younger sister: Her Daily Download

It is where the world is downloaded for her before all the things take up her mental and emotional space. Tap here for the latest headlines.

Found her. Loved her. Needed you to see her.

In 1976, Carol Burnett descended a staircase wearing a gown fashioned from green velvet curtains. And, the curtain rod was still attached.

The outfit, designed by Bob Mackie for The Carol Burnett Show's Gone with the Wind parody, was supposed to make a grand entrance. And it did… Burnett later recalled falling over laughing when she first saw it. The studio audience couldn't stop laughing either. That wonderfully ridiculous dress is now part of the Smithsonian's collection.

Burnett understood something worth borrowing this Halloween: a costume doesn't just have to make you look beautiful. Sometimes its entire job is to make the room lose it.

Her Weekly Download has two drops every week, Tuesdays and Fridays – plus a Sunday news special for the women-first stories worth knowing.

✨P.S.  Send this to her who needs to know this because the best kind of wisdom goes from women to women 💚