What are you going to be for Halloween this year? A witch? Spiderman? A dinosaur? If you answered yes to any of the above costume ideas, you are going to be wearing one of the top three most popular costumes of the year according to Google’s Frightgeist, a collection of costume trend data.
Every year, thousands of Halloween costumes are influenced by both the history of the holiday and the events and media of that year. When the United States began to celebrate Halloween in the late 1800s, the most popular costumes were witches, ghosts, and other figures typically associated with Halloween. People wanted to focus on the spooky, eerie parts of Halloween that they loved and channeled this into their homemade costumes. In the early 1900s, mass produced costumes began to appear for the first time, creating more obvious costume trends because there were not many choices when picking out a Halloween costume from the store.
The influence of media and pop culture on Halloween costumes began to take off around the 1950’s, when television and radio became more popular for children and teenagers in the United States. Standard Halloween costumes and true costume trends did not really occur until this time because without a shared popular culture, there was no way to have costumes that everyone recognized. Since then, pop culture and other cultural trends have truly shaped what costumes are popular each Halloween. The costumes that are manufactured, and therefore worn, are directly related to whatever movies, media, or events occurred since the previous October. For example, there are more gory, scary costumes near the release of a popular horror film, and there are more political costumes near major elections or political scandals.
Although pop culture is always changing, it has actually allowed for one of the most popular costumes to carry from the first American Halloweens to over a century later. Witches, the top costume of 2022, are constantly appearing in pop culture, from children’s shows, popular movie franchises, and classic Halloween films. In 2022 specifically, the release of Hocus Pocus 2 has influenced how popular witch costumes are, both in stores and in what people will be wearing. Other direct pop culture influences from this year include Spiderman, as the second most popular costume following the release of Spiderman: No Way Home, and Stranger Things characters, the fourth most popular after the release of Stranger Things 4 this summer.
If you are interested in learning more about Halloween costume trends, both on national and local levels, check out Google’s Frightgeist! As part of a Google initiative to promote how journalism can benefit people’s daily lives, Google Trends created Frightgeist, a website full of information about the most popular Halloween costumes of the year, using search information from the months leading up to Halloween. You can check out the list of the 100 most popular costumes of the year, the costume map detailing what costumes are popular in different areas, and even a generator that gives you costume ideas!
Whether you’re struggling to come up with a costume for this year or in the future, think about what was popular in pop culture and social media that year! These trends are sure to dictate costume trends as well, just as they have done since the first Halloween. When in doubt, just remember that you can never go wrong with being a witch!