“Halloweekend” is the weekends and weekdays, before, on, or after which the date of Halloween falls, when parties are held. Last year, the consensus for Halloweekend among university students was from Wednesday Oct. 29 to Sunday Nov. 2 — Halloween fell on Friday.  

Having an occasion to dress up provides the social environment for temporary freedom, to express creativity or values as partygoers typically can’t in everyday life. Halloween is like our version of Carnival — the street parties and parades to celebrate indulgence before Lent, ending in the final Mardi Gras festival — in its excess of celebration and consumption. Fashion scholar and UW professor of English Jessica Burstein drew this comparison.

“Carnival [is that] you give somebody in culture a little bit of freedom and it justifies the clamp down on the other 364 days; it's a way to maintain power,” Burstein said. “You let them express themselves — spin out. That's Carnival, that all the rules are upended.”

Halloween partygoers in 2025 dressed up with different focuses. There was a design focus that spurred creativity and resourcefulness. UW student Haein Jung tied a green bow around her neck, dressing as the protagonist of the folktale “The Green Ribbon” as retold by American author Alvin Schwartz. In the story, the protagonist named Jenny always wears a green ribbon around her neck, and it’s the only thing keeping her head attached to her body. 

“I kind of needed something simple, but not too basic, so I went on Pinterest,” Jung said. In comparison to how Jung usually dresses she said, “I’m wearing a lot of black, which is normal.” 

On Oct. 29, the first day of Halloweekend, third-year Ezekial Higgins had put a lot of time into crafting elaborate hats for a couple’s costume; they and their significant other dressed as a pair of jellyfish. 

“We went to Michaels, and we got some cardboard together,” Higgins said. “We also glued some plastic boxes to the top of this. We bought our fabrics and all of our fun ribbons, we hot glued everything together, and it was so much fun.” 

Partygoers will also dress up to display their interests and to critique pop culture phenomena. History major Mary Andolina went as the writerly side of herself. 

“I am dressed as a train conductor because I am the transportation beat writer for The Daily,” Andolina said in a paper-boy hat, overalls, and stripes.

Jazzmyn Wittrell, landscape architecture major, was Sydney Sweeney from the American Eagle ad, without the wig. 

“I’m not gonna wear a blonde wig,” Wittrell said, “it’s just gonna be me, my fucking dreads, and denim.”

Dressing up in a costume is a practice for displaying creativity and personal interests. With the addition of horror, it also becomes a larger showing of the boundaries between what is and isn’t real. 

Costumes can communicate parts of human experience we can’t convey as explicitly on non-holidays. For example, with Jung’s costume, the Green Ribbon girl losing her head directs attention to fear and pain. The bloody and graphic costumes confront and require us to consider our bodily experiences and phenomenology — the philosophical study of consciousness, and what’s unreal.

“I argue that fashion is a prosthetic and that it's a form of extending the body,” Burstein said. “When people [study] phenomenology, your sense of your body obviously doesn't end where your skin does. You can have excruciating pain where there is nothing … it's not pure material presence, so you have awareness that is as real as putting your hand into a flame … I connect all this with fashion. I mean, the line between normal and abnormal behavior [and sensations] is a constructive one.”

Halloweekend is an occasion for excess, and partygoers expressed enthusiastic consensus that the celebration goes on for many nights, all prepared to party on.

“This is just the beginning of my Halloweekend,” Andolina said. They had three other costumes planned, their favorite being Jackie Kennedy.

“I wanna do Wednesday, Thursday, Friday — maybe Sunday will just be rest,” Wittrell said. 

“There are so many nights of Halloween, you know,” Higgins said. “How much fun can you have?”