DIY has been a big trend for a few years now. It makes sense that it’s spread to Halloween costumes, where the major goals are to display creativity and individuality.

With this in mind, I wanted to see how many women’s magazines were touting DIY costumes, and parsing out any trends I could see. I initially wanted to find three lists from three different publications from this year, but had to settle for those from varying years. I looked lists from “Glamour” (published in 2010), “Marie Claire” (2013) and “Cosmopolitan” (2014).

Let’s take a look at what I found:

“Glamour:”

Year Published: 2010

Number of Entries: 21

Number of Movie-Referenced Costumes: 1

Number of TV-Referenced Costumes: 5

Number of Children’s Pop-Culture-Referenced Costumes: 0

Number of Iconic Cultural Figure References: 4

Outliers: includes 1 music-inspired costume, 9 creative* costumes

 

“Marie Claire:”

Year Published: 2013

Number of Entries: 10

Number of Movie-Referenced Costumes: 4

Number of TV-Referenced Costumes: 2

Number of Children’s Pop-Culture-Referenced Costumes: 0

Number of Iconic Cultural Figure References: 1

Outliers: includes 1 celebrity baby costume, 1 music-inspired costume

 

“Cosmopolitan:”

Year Published: 2014

Number of Entries: 20

Number of Movie-Referenced Costumes: 10

Number of TV-Referenced Costumes: 3

Number of Children’s Pop-Culture-Referenced Costumes: 5

Number of Iconic Cultural Figure References: 2

Outliers: includes 2 comic-book-referenced costumes, 4 Disney characters, 1 school girl costume

 

Overlaps:

Sandy from “Grease:” “Marie Claire” and “Cosmopolitan”

Rosie the Riveter: “Marie Claire” and “Cosmopolitan”

Sookie Stackhouse from “True Blood: “Glamour” and “Cosmopolitan”

 

Conclusions:

These three lists are virtually the same in that they focus heavily on referencing pop culture, mostly through movies and TV (see the overlaps list above). The “Glamour” list was on of the worst offenders here, as many of the ideas should’ve stayed in that year.

But the same “Glamour” list also had the most creative costumes (see asterisk above in said section), in that clever, out-of-the-ordinary costumes were included.

Overall, these DIY Halloween idea lists need a fresh look, and more space given to clever costumes and not ones just blindly referencing popular cultural aspects.