Before I talked about my day, I want to restate my questions that I want to address with this interview, which are 'is the sexy costume demanded by people?' and 'what does the effect of selling a bunch of revealing costumes to the decisions that women make on their Halloween costume?'.
Today I interviewed twenty random people in De Anza. At first I thought people would buy the costumes, because my Indonesian friends and I rely heavily on what is offered by the physical Halloween store. Indonesians often have the tendency of finding the most practical way to obtain or accomplish something. In this case, they would buy their costumes because they didn’t want things to be complicated; for example, having to buy wigs or fabric to create their costumes. Being around in this environment, my mindset thinks most people in US have the same customs with mine.
Today I interviewed twenty random people in De Anza. At first I thought people would buy the costumes, because my Indonesian friends and I rely heavily on what is offered by the physical Halloween store. Indonesians often have the tendency of finding the most practical way to obtain or accomplish something. In this case, they would buy their costumes because they didn’t want things to be complicated; for example, having to buy wigs or fabric to create their costumes. Being around in this environment, my mindset thinks most people in US have the same customs with mine.
On the other hand, due to our ‘culture’, all my Indonesian friends in San Francisco who went to a Halloween party would buy their costumes from the store. As most of the costumes in store are sexy and their own desire to be sexy, almost every single one of my female friend wore something sexy. They were the sexy valet parking girl, sexy police officer, or witch. As a result, I decided to only interview other ethnicities, except Indonesians, because I know if I interviewed them, I would get similar answers and a high percentage of buying and revealing clothing.
Here’re the questions and some of the different answers they wrote on a small piece of paper that I gave them:
Question | Person 1 | Person 2 | Person 3 |
What costume did you wear in Halloween? | nerd costume | Chuckie finster(Rugrats) | Yipe woman |
Why do you wear that particular costume? | didn't want to be typical "sexy girl" | I wanted to be different | I want to be sexy and scary |
Which do you think categorize your costume (funny, sexy, scary, or cool) | funny | funny | sexy |
Did you make your own costume or buy it in store? | make | make | buy |
From the chart above, it seems like there are so many varieties of answers, while actually 80% create their own costumes and 80% categorize their costume to other themes other than sexy, mostly are funny.
After interviewing 20 people, it surprised me how different the answers are than what I’ve expected, that other girls would be ‘lazy’ and buy their costume in store. This is obviously not what happened.
On the contrary, I believe most women want to look good and beautiful to impress guys or just to be confident about themselves. In turn, this is what I assume is the case with Halloween costumes, in this interview, that women will want to be sexy in Halloween. However, it turns out that they want to be ‘different’, they don’t want look the same like in regular normal life.
If so many women make their own outfits, why are people complaining that women are being sexualized just because sellers offer so many revealing outfits? Does it matter what they are selling?
Because this is only the first part of interview, I won’t write my conclusions about interviews in this post; the results may be different. Tomorrow I will interview 20 more people and we will see whether it’s the same result or not.
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