Vintage Halloween Costumes: 1890s-1920s

Halloween is fun. It always has been. Even though there seems to be attempts to change it, it's still stayed basically the same:

You dress up.
You go trick or treating.
You get scared.
You scare somebody else.
You eat all your candy.
You throw up.

Halloween has been celebrated mostly the same way ever since.....well.....heck, I don't know...a heckuva long time. At least as far back as the 1800s in America.

One thing that changes constantly, however, are the costumes.
Each year a new fad, movie, or TV show inspires new costumes.....the same way they influence new pre-sweetened breakfast cereals. In the gallery below are some old, vintage photographs of kids, teens, and adults dressed in various costumes. Going through the hundreds of pictures, I noticed many kids and adults dressed up as clowns...for what reason I can only guess. The makeup was easy?

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Another favorite from back then were witches, occasional fairies, and really weird human masks. Many of these had to be homemade, some look like they weren't Halloween costumes at all, but actors from some kind of stage play or pageant. Remember, they didn't have any super-heroes to base costumes on over 100 years ago...just imagination...or whatever the kid next door was wearing.

I've tried to limit the clown photos to show some original costumes: some funny, some weird, some scary, some where you wonder “what the heck were they thinking?”

Take a look and see what Halloween was like from approximately the late 1800s-1920s!
Would you like to dress up as any of these?

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