Some households gown up for Halloween as characters from a shared universe. Elsa, Anna, and Olaf. Black Widow, Captain America, and Ironman. This yr, my youngsters’ costumes couldn’t be extra completely different: my youngest baby goes as a manga superhero, my oldest baby is just too cool to decorate up, and my center baby goes as a duck. Not precisely cohesive!
Jokes apart, Halloween costumes have turn into a type of cultural index for us in the USA. What our youngsters gown up as displays the themes, tendencies, characters, and historic moments of the yr.
This month, we’re analyzing the highest Halloween costumes by yr—not precisely scientific, however seasonal and enjoyable. Get pleasure from!
First, we loaded 5 “prime Halloween costumes” lists into Domo.
To measure costume reputation, we discovered 5 lists of prime Halloween costumes by start yr and pulled them into Domo. We sourced lists from Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, POPSUGAR, and Give it Love. The yr I used to be born, Reader’s Digest says the highest Halloween costume was Michael Myers…the serial killer.
Then we categorized the info to see which spheres have influenced costumes essentially the most. The characters on these lists got here from films, toys, Broadway, comedian books, and the music world. Even politics—Richard Nixon was apparently a prime costume in 1974, the yr he resigned the presidency.
Taking a look at our classes, we see that movie-based costumes are by far the most well-liked. Politicians are least widespread, with solely three entries.
Subsequent, we checked out manufacturers or themes of costumes.
Understanding that the costumes we select recommend one thing concerning the tradition at massive, we determined to zoom out and contemplate the most well-liked themes represented. Superheroes, Batman, Disney, and Star Wars come to the highest. To create this visible, we used a brand new bubble chart that was a part of Domo’s October 2023 function launch.
We’ll observe that, though Disney now owns each Indiana Jones and Star Wars, the Disney class refers to characters from the principle franchise: Mickey Mouse, Elsa, Princess Tiana, and so forth.
In case you’re questioning, the “Brady Bunch” theme refers to particularly Marcia and Jan. Sorry, Cindy.
We additionally checked out repeats of the identical costumes throughout lists and throughout years.
We needed to perform a little knowledge cleansing, after all, to align with how every checklist names issues. For instance, Cosmopolitan listed “Tony Manero from Saturday Night time Fever” and Reader’s Digest listed “John Travolta (effectively, kind of)” in 1978. These are basically the identical costume, so we labeled them collectively as “Tony Manero (John Travolta) from Saturday Night time Fever.” Rubbish in, rubbish out, as they are saying.
Right here’s what we discovered: Spider-Man was the most-repeated costume, displaying up 5 completely different occasions throughout our lists. Captain Jack Sparrow additionally had a powerful displaying, as did Ghostface, Batman, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Large props for longevity to Morticia Addams, who confirmed up in 1967 and 1991.
See each prime Halloween costume—by yr, theme, class, and frequency.
Lastly, here’s a detailed compilation of all of the rankings. We’ve additionally included slightly image thumbnail, too, since an image tells a thousand phrases. You’ll be able to filter, search, and export.
