I’m Still Dressing Like Morticia Addams Even Though Halloween Is Over

In this op-ed, our Deputy Editor Ella Cerón shares why she dresses like Morticia Addams long after Halloween passes.

Long before books that extolled the virtues of “leaning in” and being a #girlboss, one woman gave me a blueprint for success I could actually use. “I'm just like any modern woman trying to have it all,” Morticia Addams mused. “Loving husband, a family. It's just... I wish I had more time to seek out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade.”

I was six years old, watching The Addams Family for the first time. I instantly wanted to grow up to be Morticia.

I have watched that movie every year since, and not only in October. Because something about Morticia and her family — and especially her husband Gomez, and her sardonic daughter Wednesday — spoke to me. Every year, I consider dressing like the Addams matriarch for Halloween, but I never stop there. I want to dress like Morticia Addams the other 364 days of the year, too.

Her look is simple enough: A long black dress, long black hair, nails as red as my lipstick. Over the years, I’ve amassed enough black dresses that my closet looks like a void, a black hole of fabric where pigment is absorbed like light. I have a working theory that if you were to let even the cheeriest of prints hang out in there long enough, it too would turn into a black dress, as if it was some otherworldly fashion diamond succumbing to the pressure.

It’s not like brands will tire from making black dresses any time soon. The Little Black Dress is as enduring as time itself; everyone from Audrey Hepburn (she liked Givenchy) to Posh Spice (who famously had to choose a “little Gucci dress”) has made her mark with an LBD of her own. (My favorite by far? Rihanna, who knows how to accessorize the dress like no other.) While some people think a black dress is safe or even boring, I see the details: the way texture makes one dress different from another, or a lace hem elevates a look. I also see a possibility to accessorize, and a confidence that people know I’ll be the girl in the corner… in all black.

And that’s the thing about Morticia that really speaks to me. She’s powerful, in a way that doesn’t require her to raise her voice to get not only what she wants, but what she and her family deserve. In the first movie, when Gomez Addams loses his fortune and suffers a nervous breakdown, she rallies herself to find a job and provide for her family. She’s a philanthropist, and gives generously to her children’s school at the annual auction. She knows when to trust someone, and when to cut her losses — and deliver a withering ether about home decor.

She’s been through a number of reboots, too: First came the comic, published in The New Yorker in the 1930s, in which a witchy mother knitted pajamas for four-legged babies. (She’s also an anomaly of her own kind; where pop culture often, concerningly, ascribes its witches to a troubling binary of “good” or “bad,” Morticia simply is.) The Morticia I grew up with, as played by Anjelica Huston, studied spells and hexes in college, sure, but she also lived and moved within a mortal world. She was mystical, and unlike every other mom in pop culture. There was no minivan, no power suit, and never a hair out of place. If ever a woman could teach me how to have it all, I figured, Morticia definitely could.

She’s also not afraid of death; she welcomes it and any number of rituals and rites that come along with it. As a girl whose family constantly juggled celebrating Halloween and the more reverential Dia de los Muertos, I straddled two cultures with very oppositional beliefs about the afterlife. My American family believed in horror movies and ghost stories; my Mexican family saw ghosts as our loved ones coming back to visit us. The fact that the Addamses are reverential about the macabre made sense in my child-brain, letting me know it was OK to be more than a little, well, dark.

It’s easy enough to dress like Morticia on October 31. You grab a black dress, maybe opt for a wig, and walk out the door. I dress like her so frequently now that my friends consider a Morticia costume to be a cop-out, the easiest option on a last-minute timeline. But look: I’m a modern woman trying to have it all. Aiming to reach my most logical conclusion on Halloween feels nothing short of magic.

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