I didn’t encounter this site in time to do a pre-Halloween post, so consider this an extremely advance post for next year.

Take Back Halloween bills itself as “a costume guide for women with imagination.”

We love Halloween. We really love Halloween. We think it’s cool that there’s one day a year when people can dress up as anything they want. What we don’t think is cool is that increasingly women are only supposed to dress up as one thing: “Sexy _____” (fill in the blank). Sexy Nurse, Sexy Cowgirl, Sexy whatever.

Their aim is to provide other options, and they’ve got dozens of costume suggestions gleaned from history and legend. Why would you want to be “generic sexy witch” when you can be Ada Lovelace or Lizzie Borden?

Each costume idea page includes a capsule description of the woman it depicts, several reference photos, and suggestions for recreating the costume. Their resources are all no-sew and many are very fast and easy, which is a great boon to those who don’t have much time and/or advanced sewing skills (and, of course, if you have both, their ideas are still a wonderful jumping-off point for crafting your own costume). This means you can put together a costume as easily as buying something off the rack, without the worry of showing up at a party to find six other people wearing the same costume.

In addition to the main site, there’s also a companion blog and Facebook page. Since Inanna, Boudicca, Jane Austen and are all way cooler than any of the store-bought adult costumes I’ve seen lately, they’re definitely worth a look.

p.s. – I’ll be participating in the unfortunately-acronymed NaBloPoMo again this year, so there will be a post every day of November, including weekends. Can you hardly wait? I thought so.