Your Halloween Costume Expires Sooner Than You Think
Past Tense
A brief history of wearing the zeitgeist, from the Rubik’s Cube to Minions.
Coneheads in New York. 1979.John Sotomayor/The New York Times
ByJennifer Harlan
The high heels were on the move. Dozens of New York teachers marched through the streets of Greenwich Village on Oct. 31, 1986, wrapped in fabric stilettos, to cheers and applause. It was a perfectly timely costume: The ladies were dressed as the infamous footwear collection of the freshly ousted first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos.
But three decades later, the joke has lost its punch. We’ve moved on to other scandals, Ms. Marcos and her prodigious closet long since faded from memory. Ask millennials about it, and they’re likely to respond with a bemused “Imelda who?”
Halloween was, in many ways, one of the earliest manifestations of what we now call fandom. And an of-the-moment costume has become a form of social currency. On a holiday designed for people to stand out, the greatest achievement can be being “in.” But timeliness is, by its very nature, fleeting. Your Popeye’s chicken sandwich may seem brilliant today, but seen from a few decades remove you’re just fried meat.
While Halloween in the United States dates to the late 1800s, the traditional dressing up didn’t start until the 1930s, said Lesley Bannatyne, the author of five books on the holiday’s history. Halloween until then had been an occasion for mischief and light vandalism. Fed up with thrown eggs and stolen fences, homeowners decided to try a different tack: Bribe the would-be miscreants. And with the rise of trick-or-treating came costumes.
“Trick-or-treating was kind of an effort on the homeowners’ part to be prepared,” she said. “It’s like, O.K., you’re going to come to my house and demand something, and if I slam the door in your face you’re going to do something to my yard? Well, I’m ready this year. I’ve got candy.”
Early Halloween costumes were homemade and classic: witches, ghosts, princesses, the occasional Frankenstein. But after World War II, things shifted, largely thanks to one Brooklyn company.
Ben Cooper Inc. was founded in 1937 by the brothers Ben and Nat Cooper. Sons of Russian immigrants, they had gotten their start in vaudeville in the 1920s, creating costumes for Harlem’s Cotton Club and the Ziegfeld Follies. When it came to Halloween, their specialty was pop culture. As comic books, cartoons and television took off, the Coopers began buying up the rights to characters like Sleeping Beauty and Davy Crockett and turning them into plastic masks. Kids could become their heroes for a day.
The Coopers weren’t the first to manufacture character-driven costumes, but they perfected the art of translating the zeitgeist into wearable form. The question across America each fall soon became not what were you going to be for Halloween, but who.
“It was a magical time in history. Pop culture was coming into its own. And these guys, Nat and Ben Cooper, were basically the kings of Halloween,” said Jon James Miller, an author who was part of a recent, unsuccessful effort to revive the Ben Cooper brand, which was bought and absorbed by Rubie’s Costume Company in 1992.
Some of Ben Cooper’s licensing successes included Snow White in 1937 and Spider-Man in 1963. (The latter was reportedly Marvel’s first merchandising deal.) But the company’s biggest coup came in 1977, when the brothers saw a rough cut of an upcoming space movie. Producers weren’t optimistic about the film, so they let the director have the merchandising rights, and he licensed several characters to the Coopers. The movie, as it turned out, was a success, and come October kids across America could trick-or-treat as Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia or Darth Vader.
The pop-culture Halloween costume really took off in the 1970s and ’80s, when grown-ups started getting in on the fun. The 1982 Tylenol poisonings and reports of tainted candy led wary parents to keep their kids inside at parties — where they would chaperone, in costume. And the boom of science fiction and horror, led by films such as John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” spawned a wide array of disguises that were inappropriate for kids but great for adults.
We asked readers to send us their best pop-culture Halloween costumes. Helen Smith and her cousin went as the Skywalker siblings in 1984. “My aunts made them for us, and we wore them for three years,” she said of the costumes.
Helen Smith
Slide 1 of 12We asked readers to send us their best pop-culture Halloween costumes. Helen Smith and her cousin went as the Skywalker siblings in 1984. “My aunts made them for us, and we wore them for three years,” she said of the costumes.
Helen Smith
“Halloween had been spooky and eerie but not gory or scary until that movie,” Ms. Bannatyne said. “That brought older teens and adults in on the holiday.”
According to the National Retail Federation, 18- to 24-year-olds are today the demographic most likely to celebrate Halloween: 73 percent plan to dress up this year. In years when the holiday falls on a weekend, Howard Beige, executive vice president of Rubie’s, said adult costumes could account for half the company’s sales.
And now that your competition is not just your neighbors but all of social media, the drive to have the coolest, most of-the-moment costume has only increased.
“We move so fast now that to be on top of something is a kind of achievement,” Ms. Bannatyne said. “Costumes used to be about hiding who you were, but now, chances are, if you have a really fabulous costume, your face is visible. You want credit for your originality.” The problem, of course, with being of the moment is that moments pass. There are figures that become modern classics — every year another batch of E.T.s phone home — but they’re rare. Even the most seemingly omnipresent of icons usually become obsolete.
You can trace the genealogy of American pop culture through costumes gone by — the year of Coneheads, of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of Lady Gaga’s meat dress. They’ve become generational sigils: A millennial would know Simba’s mane anywhere, while one glance at Lion-O will elicit a “ThunderCats, ho!” from a child of the ’80s.
This year, Mr. Beige says, you can expect to see a bevy of Spider-Men and Captain Marvels. You can thank “It Chapter Two” for the creepy clowns running rampant in your streets. Employees of Scoops Ahoy will be fighting Demogorgons from Philadelphia to Santa Fe.
But flash forward to a teenager in 2042 asking, “What’s a Stranger Thing?”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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