Costume once meant everyday dress, not only disguises
Costume once named the distinctive clothes of a class, job, nation, or occasion—riding kit, evening wear, even swimwear counted. Fashion drift narrowed English usage toward theatrical, Halloween, and mascot outfits that deliberately change who you seem to be.
As a cultural signal, costume marks gender, ethnicity, nationality, occupation, activity, and epoch, and local norms decide what counts as appropriate. The word travels from Italian through French, sharing a root with custom, and reaches back to Latin consuetudo, meaning usage; its clothing-only sense firms up from the eighteenth century. An 1899 London letter could still praise a smart afternoon costume, whereas English now saves the word mostly for outfits meant to change who you seem to be.
Before ready-to-wear, commercial garments were sewn by hand, and into the early twentieth century women costumiers often ran businesses supplying complicated or intimate female dress, hats, and corsets. National dress still advertises identity—the Scottish kilt, Turkish Zeybek, Japanese kimono. Bhutan prescribes traditional clothing even for its monarchy: men wear the knee-length Gho belted with a Kera, its pouch-like front once holding food and a dagger and now a phone, while women wear the ankle-length Kira under Tego and Wonju jackets.
On stage and screen, costume works with other stagecraft to fix a character’s period, place, season, and status; commedia’s Harlequin and Pantaloon exaggerate a single trait. Behind the scenes, a technician turns a designer’s sketch into a garment by draping fabric on a form or drafting patterns flat on paper. Edith Head and Orry-Kelly, both born late in 1897, rank among Hollywood’s best-known designers.
Festivals keep dressing up alive. Halloween disguises trace to Celtic Samhain, and in 2022 US households spent about $34 of an average $100 Halloween budget on costumes. Jews dress up for Purim, Himalayan Buddhists dance the masked Cham, and in 1879 Hans Makart led Vienna in a costume parade for an imperial anniversary.
Source: Costume
