The Puritan Fashion Police Would Condemn Wicked: Is Being Fashionable a Sin?
According to a 2022 US World News Report Study, witches were the most popular Halloween costume across the country. Every October, children roam the streets with broomsticks holding cauldrons of candy, while teens flock to parties in green face paint and tall, crooked hats. This classic silhouette of the witch has become instantly recognizable, yet beneath its surface lies a long and haunting history of feminine expression through fashion.
During the Salem Witch Trials, which claimed 25 lives and accused over 200 innocent women, clothing became more of a matter of taste, but a moral statement. In Puritan Massachusetts, clothing was strictly policed, particularly for women who modestly dressed in muted high-neck gowns, aprons, coifs, and partlets. Dressing simply and uniformly combatted pride, greed, and envy—all biblical sins. Flamboyant clothing was considered a visual sign of witchcraft.
Photo: Atlas Obscura
Importantly, the Puritan wardrobe reinforced submission—wives and daughters were expected to wear their humility as visually as their colors. Good Puritan women were subordinate to men, and women who failed to fulfill this role through fashion, attitude, or societal contribution were punished by the Witch Trials. Ann Hibbens, for example, was famously executed for disagreeing with the men in her life: her husband, minister, neighbors, and the carpenter redoing her house. Her second husband, William, spoke during her trial, encouraging the judge to hang her. Today, as women reclaim the witch as an emblem of independence and resistance, we must ask: can these costumes ever become symbols of healing—or do they still carry the shadows of their past?
While the mass-produced witch costumes at Spirit Halloween may look far removed from the women once accused in Salem, every piece carries historical relevance. The iconic pointed hat, for instance, draws inspiration from Quaker women’s bonnets, garments that Puritans despised for demonstrating a less rigid and structured religion. The long black dress became reimagined as the color of “black magic” and moral corruption. Green skin, popularized by The Wizard of Oz, transformed the witch into something otherworldly, unnatural, and distinctly female in her monstrosity. Even the hooked nose and warts were borrowed from antisemitic caricatures that linked women’s bodies to greed and ugliness. Despite our cultural amnesia, it appears that the witch still bears the traces of sexism embedded in American imagination.
Photo: Halloween Express
However, Wicked, released last year and now the highest-grossing movie musical of all time, offered a more feminist reinterpretation of the witch. Elphaba, played by Cynthia Erivo, wears the classic pointed hat and adorns the green skin, but rather than repeating the sexist narrative that casts women as monsters, it transforms that story into one of individuality and defiance. Yet her story remains complicated. Elphaba is not a flawless heroine, but an anti-hero created by the systems of oppression around her. Like the women accused in Salem, she is judged for her every action, demeanour, and above all, her appearance. Her costume becomes a fashioned armor against the moral and social scrutiny imposed upon her. In this way, Wicked turns the witch into a language of empowerment, even as it honors the historical, social, and cultural constraints that shaped her image.
Photo: WWD
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