The History of Halloween Costumes: From Celtic Disguises to the Party City Era
Quick Answer
What is the history of Halloween costumes? Halloween costumes originated in the Celtic festival of Samhain, where people disguised themselves as spirits or the dead to avoid being targeted by malevolent souls on the night the boundary between worlds thinned. The Scottish and Irish tradition of "guising" formalized the costumed door-to-door practice, requiring performers to earn their treats with a song, joke, or recitation. Commercial Halloween costumes in America appeared in the 1930s, peaked in the plastic-mask-and-smock era of the 1950s through 1980s, and exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry when Halloween became an adult holiday in the 1970s and 1980s. Americans now spend roughly $4 billion on Halloween costumes annually.
Halloween costumes have a longer and stranger history than the Spirit Halloween store suggests. They started as a literal survival strategy. They became a performance art tradition that required you to actually earn your treat. They were industrialized into a children's market, then re-claimed by adults, then turned into a $4 billion annual industry with its own pop-up retail ecosystem. The plastic mask with the elastic band that cuts into your face is just one chapter. Here is the full story of why we dress up on October 31st and how that practice became what it is today.
The Original Reason: You Were Hiding
The Celtic festival of Samhain, observed at the end of October and beginning of November, marked the close of the harvest and the start of winter. The Celts believed this transition thinned the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, allowing spirits, some benevolent, many not, to cross over. One documented response to the danger of malevolent spirits wandering the earth was disguise: dress as a spirit yourself, or dress as one of the dead, and the dangerous ones would take you for one of their own and pass you by. The costume was not self-expression. It was camouflage.
This is the deep root of the Halloween costume tradition, and it has a logic that makes complete sense within its own framework. If the world is full of things that want to harm you on a specific night, and those things can be fooled by appearances, then appearing to be something you are not is a reasonable precaution. The disguise was protective. The holiday itself was threatening. The costume was the solution.
Guising: You Had to Earn It
The Scottish and Irish tradition of "guising," which developed from the older Samhain practices and traveled to North America with immigrants, took the costume from protection to performance. Guisers went door to door in costume on Halloween night, but the transaction at each door was not simply a request for candy. Guisers were expected to perform, to sing a song, tell a joke, recite a poem, or do some kind of entertainment, before receiving their treat. The costume was part of the act: you were playing a character, and the character owed the household a performance.
This requirement to perform is almost entirely absent from modern American trick-or-treating, but it survived longer than most people realize. Written accounts of American Halloween from the early 20th century describe children expected to do something, a song, a recitation, a trick, to earn their treats. The shift to simply showing up and saying "trick or treat" happened gradually through the 1940s and 1950s as the holiday was standardized, and the costume became decoupled from performance. You no longer had to be good at being your character. You just had to be dressed as one.
The Ben Cooper Era and Commercial Costumes
The Ben Cooper company, founded in New York in 1937, is responsible for a specific aesthetic that defined American Halloween for roughly five decades: the costume as a licensed character smock paired with a plastic mask held on by a thin elastic band that inevitably snapped by the end of the evening. Cooper secured licenses with movie studios and television networks and produced costumes of every popular character: cowboys, princesses, superheroes, monsters, and eventually whatever was currently on television. By the 1950s and 1960s, the Ben Cooper costume was the default American Halloween costume, sold in department stores and drugstores in a cardboard box with a cellophane window.
The plastic mask was a particular innovation: cheap to produce, immediately recognizable, and genuinely uncomfortable to breathe in for more than ten minutes. It also established a template for the Halloween costume that persists in some form today: the costume as a licensed property, the Halloween industry as an extension of the entertainment industry, the holiday as a vehicle for character merchandising. Ben Cooper eventually went bankrupt in 1992, a victim of competition from newer costume manufacturers and the gradual shift toward more elaborate adult costumes that could not be reduced to a smock and a mask.
Halloween Goes Adult: The 1970s and 1980s
The transformation of Halloween from a children's holiday into an adult one is one of the more significant cultural shifts in the history of the holiday, and it did not happen accidentally. Urban gay communities, particularly in San Francisco and New York, were early and enthusiastic adopters of Halloween as an adult costume party, using the holiday's licensed transgression, its one-night permission to be someone else entirely, to create elaborate, theatrical, and often politically pointed celebrations. The Castro Street Halloween celebration in San Francisco, which began in the 1970s and eventually drew tens of thousands of participants, was one of the most visible examples of adult Halloween culture establishing itself as a significant tradition.
The broader adult Halloween market grew through the 1980s and 1990s as costume manufacturers recognized the opportunity. Adult costumes required different economics than children's costumes: more elaborate construction, higher price points, and a consumer willing to spend serious money on something worn for one night. Halloween parties became a fixture of adult social calendars. The holiday's adult spending eventually overtook its children's spending: today, adults account for a significant majority of Halloween costume purchases.
The "Sexy Everything" Phenomenon
The adult Halloween costume market produced one of the more sociologically interesting costume phenomena of the late 20th century: the proliferation of "sexy" versions of any and every costume category. Sexy nurse, sexy witch, sexy construction worker, sexy historical figure, sexy vegetable. The pattern became so universal and so remarked upon that it generated its own cultural commentary, including the observation, which sociologists have analyzed seriously, that Halloween functions as one of the few culturally sanctioned occasions for women to wear traditionally revealing clothing without social penalty.
The "sexy costume" phenomenon is not simply about the costumes. It reflects the broader function of Halloween as a holiday of licensed transgression: a single night per year when normal social rules are suspended, when you are permitted to be someone or something you are not, when the usual constraints on identity and presentation are relaxed. The costume is always, in some sense, permission. Permission to be frightening, permission to be funny, permission to be dramatic, permission to be something the other 364 days do not allow. The specific permission varies by person and by year. The structure is consistent.
Same Shit, Different Costume
One of the most durable Halloween costume traditions is the topical costume: whatever is dominating the news cycle in October becomes a costume by Halloween. Political figures, viral moments, public scandals, pop culture phenomena. Every October produces its own specific set of topical costumes that will be instantly recognizable at a party and completely incomprehensible to anyone watching a recording of that party five years later. The topical Halloween costume is a form of cultural commentary, a way of processing the year through the specific lens of the holiday, dressed as the thing that made everyone tired in the preceding twelve months.
The Same Shit Different Costume T-shirt is the honest version of this tradition: the acknowledgment that the costumes change every year and the underlying situation does not. The We're Getting Spooky T-shirt is for the people who don't need a costume to make their position on October clear. The full Halloween collection is for everyone who treats the holiday as a personality trait rather than a single evening. For where the holiday itself came from, the history of Halloween covers the full arc from Samhain to secular American tradition.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why do we wear costumes on Halloween?
The costume tradition originates in the Celtic festival of Samhain, where people disguised themselves as spirits or the dead to avoid being targeted by malevolent souls on the night the boundary between the living and dead was believed to thin. The disguise was protective: if you appeared to be a spirit, evil spirits would pass you by. The Scottish and Irish "guising" tradition developed this further into a costumed door-to-door performance practice, requiring entertainers to sing or tell jokes before receiving treats. The protective and performative traditions merged into the modern Halloween costume.
What was guising?
Guising was the Scottish and Irish Halloween tradition of going door to door in costume and performing, telling a joke, singing a song, or reciting a poem, before receiving a treat. The word comes from "disguise." Unlike modern trick-or-treating, guising required the performer to actually do something to earn the reward. The costume was part of the act: guisers were playing characters, not merely wearing them. Scottish and Irish immigrants brought guising to North America, where it gradually evolved into trick-or-treating, though the performance requirement was dropped as the practice was standardized in the mid-20th century.
Who made the first commercial Halloween costumes?
The Ben Cooper company, founded in New York in 1937, is the most historically significant early commercial Halloween costume manufacturer. Cooper secured licenses with entertainment studios and produced the plastic-mask-and-smock costumes that defined American Halloween from the 1950s through the 1980s. The company produced licensed versions of virtually every popular character: television cowboys, superheroes, monsters, and whatever was currently popular with children. Ben Cooper went bankrupt in 1992, but the aesthetic it established, the licensed character costume as the default Halloween option, remains the template for the costume industry today.
When did Halloween become an adult holiday?
Halloween began transitioning into an adult holiday in the 1970s, with urban communities, particularly gay communities in cities like San Francisco, developing the holiday as a vehicle for elaborate adult costume parties and public celebrations. The Castro Street Halloween celebration in San Francisco became one of the most visible examples of adult Halloween culture in America. The broader adult costume market grew through the 1980s and 1990s as manufacturers recognized the commercial opportunity. Today adults account for a majority of Halloween costume spending, and the holiday is as firmly established as an adult social occasion as a children's one.
How much do Americans spend on Halloween costumes?
Americans spend approximately $4 billion on Halloween costumes annually, making costumes the largest single category of Halloween spending after candy and decorations. The figure includes both children's and adult costumes, with adult costumes accounting for an increasing share of total spending as the holiday has expanded into a full adult holiday. Pet costumes have also become a significant market, with Americans spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually on costumes for dogs and cats. The total Halloween retail market in the United States is estimated at over $12 billion annually.
Why are there so many "sexy" Halloween costumes?
The proliferation of sexy costume options reflects Halloween's function as a holiday of licensed transgression: a culturally sanctioned occasion when normal social rules are suspended and people are permitted to present themselves differently than they ordinarily would. Researchers who study gender and costume have noted that Halloween provides one of the few occasions when women can wear traditionally revealing clothing without the social penalty that would apply on other nights. The costume functions as permission. The specific permission varies, but the structure of the holiday as a night when ordinary rules don't fully apply creates the conditions for the costume options that result.
