The Halloween costume has a 2,500-year history that runs from animal skins worn by Celtic villagers on Irish hilltops to elaborate $500 professional cosplay worn by adults at Halloween parties in American cities. In between lie centuries of disguise traditions — mumming, guising, souling — and one of the most interesting commercial histories in American retail. The story of the Halloween costume is, in miniature, the story of how a folk tradition becomes a mass market.
Ancient Origins: Disguise as Protection
The first Halloween costumes were not worn for entertainment. The Celtic festival of Samhain, observed on October 31st, was believed to be a night when the boundary between the living and the dead dissolved. The spirits of the dead — including hostile ones — could cross into the world of the living. Wearing a disguise of animal skins and heads served a specific protective function: to make yourself unrecognizable to any spirit searching for a living soul to possess or torment.
This protective logic — disguise as defense — is fundamentally different from modern costume-wearing but explains several persistent Halloween costume conventions: the emphasis on transformation (becoming something you are not), the preference for frightening or supernatural costumes, and the covering of the face (the mask as the essential element, not the rest of the costume).
Medieval Traditions: Mumming and Guising
Through the medieval period, the practice of wearing costumes at autumn community festivals spread across Britain and Ireland in the form of mumming and guising. Mummers — people in disguise — performed plays, songs, and dances at houses in exchange for food and drink. The disguise was practical: it allowed mummers to perform outrageous material, mock authority figures, and engage in ribald behavior without personal accountability. The mask made the performer anonymous.
In Scotland and Ireland, the Halloween-specific practice of guising (going in disguise) involved children and young people dressing in costume and going door to door to perform — sing a song, tell a joke, or recite a poem — in exchange for food. This is the direct ancestor of modern trick-or-treating, and the costume was an essential part of the ritual. You could not guise without a disguise.
19th Century: American Folk Costumes
When Halloween arrived in America with the Irish and Scottish immigration of the 1840s and 1850s, costumes traveled with it. 19th-century American Halloween costumes were entirely homemade — repurposed old clothes, painted faces, and whatever household materials could be assembled into a disguise. Halloween costume parties became fashionable in the late 19th century, documented in etiquette books and women's magazines as organized social occasions.
The dominant costume themes of the 19th century were supernatural: ghosts (white sheet), witches (pointed hat and cape), and skeletons (painted clothing). These themes reflected the holiday's folk origin as a festival of the dead. The witch in particular, rooted in both Christian demonology and folk tradition, became the defining Halloween costume of the era and has never left the top of the charts since.
The Commercial Era: 1920s–1960s
The first commercially produced Halloween costumes appeared in the 1920s. Small manufacturers produced papier-mâché masks and simple fabric costumes, distributed through five-and-dime stores including Woolworth's and S.S. Kresge. The market was small but growing.
The pivotal company in Halloween costume history is the Ben Cooper Company, founded in 1937 by Ben Cooper in Brooklyn, New York. Cooper recognized that children wanted to dress as popular culture figures — not just ghosts and witches — and pursued licensing agreements with film studios, television networks, and character rights holders. The resulting product — a printed fabric smock depicting the character's image, paired with a plastic mask showing the character's face, packaged in a window display box — became the defining American Halloween costume from the late 1930s through the 1980s.
Ben Cooper costumes covered characters from every corner of popular culture: Superman, Mickey Mouse, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Dracula, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Lone Ranger, and later Star Wars characters (licensed from Lucasfilm in 1977, the year the original film was released). The plastic mask, with its small eyeholes and painted features, is one of the defining visual artifacts of 20th-century American childhood. Ben Cooper filed for bankruptcy in 1992, unable to compete with the changing retail landscape, but its costumes are now collected as vintage Americana.
Collegeville Flag and Manufacturing Company, based in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, was Ben Cooper's primary competitor through much of this era and produced similar licensed costume sets.
The Modern Era: 1970s–Present
The Halloween costume market expanded dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s as the holiday's adult component grew alongside its children's component. The success of horror films — particularly the slasher genre following John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) and Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) — created adult costume categories around film characters: Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees became Halloween costume standards within seasons of their films' release.
Spirit Halloween, founded in 1983, transformed the retail landscape for Halloween costumes by pioneering the seasonal pop-up store model. Rather than competing with year-round retailers for permanent shelf space, Spirit leased vacant retail locations (often former anchor stores in struggling malls) for the August-through-Halloween season. By the 2010s, Spirit Halloween was operating over 1,400 seasonal locations and had become the dominant Halloween costume retailer in North America.
The rise of the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s democratized Halloween costume access, connecting buyers with specialty costume makers, vintage costume sellers, and international manufacturers. Amazon's Halloween store, launched in the early 2010s, put thousands of costume options within reach of any buyer. The result has been a dramatic expansion of costume diversity: in any given year, the top Halloween costumes include licensed characters from the most recent blockbuster films alongside traditional standards like witch, vampire, and zombie that have never left the list.
Cosplay and the Adult Costume Market
The 21st century has seen Halloween costume-wearing expand significantly among adults, partly through the influence of anime and gaming convention culture ("cosplay"). Adults who spend significant money and labor on costumes for Comic-Con, PAX, and other conventions bring that investment to Halloween, elevating the quality standard for adult Halloween costumes. The Spirit Halloween animatronic mask and professional-grade foam costume bodysuit now compete in the same adult costume market as a handmade Game of Thrones character costume that took three months to construct.
The Halloween Costume Bible series at HalloweenPlaybook.com covers the full range of adult, children's, couples, teens, toddlers, and plus-size costumes with specific product recommendations across every budget — from under $20 quick-assembly options to premium full-look builds.