costumes

If Santa Paws isn't quite your speed, what about those prancing and pawing reindeer? There are plenty of super cute reindeer antlers that are perfect for your pup's wearing pleasure so check out some of my favorites for your lil reindogs below.

I'm talking about dressing a pet in this adorable Turkey costume ($42) to make him the (other) star of your Thanksgiving dinner. Did I trick you? While the ensemble is on the costlier side, you can't put a price tag on the photo opportunity. The festive Fall colors will last long after the leftovers do . . . right up to Halloween next year, too.

You've got about 24 hours to get your costumes in order for Saturday night Halloween celebrations. Today in the Sugar office, we have Kristen Stewart — complete with a gray, pulled-up hoodie, skinny jeans, Converse, and Wayfarers — Blair Waldorf sans the attitude, Nicole Richie, and a shop girl from PopSugar's Retail Therapy game. But before you go for the celebrity costume jugular, consider some of our Halloween suggestions.

You could be sexy or unsexy, au courant, female friendly, or matchy matchy in a couples costume sort of way. Whether your costume's set and pressed or it's just a wrinkled idea in your mind, tell us what you're planning.

Photo courtesy of AMC

Dressing up for Halloween is nothing new, but it's not that old either. It was brought to North America by the 19th-century wave of Scottish and Irish immigrants, whose children went door to door asking for coins in a practice called "guising."

"Guising" reminds me of "cruising," so it shouldn't surprise you to learn we have gay men to thank for today's sexed-up Halloween. New York City hosted its first Halloween parade in 1973, and with its location in the city's West Village gay district, it quickly went from children in masks to men in drag. Gay neighborhoods in other cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles followed, reveling in the '70s pornographic spirit. It was only a matter of market research before stores started selling sexy costumes.

Yet this doesn't explain how the sexy trend became a women's issue. Straight men, after all, usually do gross, funny, or mock sexy, while one retailer told The New York Times in 2006 that 90 percent of its women's costumes were sexy.

Adie Nelson, PhD, author of the study The Pink Dragon Is Female: Halloween Costumes and Gender Markers, believes it began with costumes for little girls. "Heroic figures for women or considered icons of femininity are very much anchored in the femme fatale imagery," and that includes "Disney heroines, witches, cocktail waitresses, French maids, and an interchangeable variety of beauty queens."

Could it be that we took the already very girly costumes of our youth and sexed them up because we were old enough to? Or is it more meaningful? "I love to imagine that there's some real social message, that it's sort of the female equivalent of doing drag," Dr. Nelson said. "But I don't think it's necessarily so well thought out."

What do you think?

Source: Flickr User PrincessAshley