A brief Halloween history of pets in costumes

This year for Halloween, I will be dressing up my cattle dog mix called Annie Oakley Tater Tot as Captain America. Last year, I put her in a bandana and cowboy hat and said she was her namesake. My first dog, who passed away last year, had been a queen, a mermaid, a dinosaur, and Superman. She didn’t much like being dressed in costumes, but the pictures were cute, and got all those likes on Facebook and Instagram.

This all feels a bit silly, but I’m far from the only person to put stuff on her dog for as long as she tolerates it. Of the $9 billion Americans are expected to spend on Halloween this year, $480 million of that is on our pets, according to the National Retail Foundation. That’s up from $5.8 billion total and $220 million on pets in 2010.

Unlike Christmas or Valentine’s Day or even Mother’s and Father’s Day, Halloween doesn’t have the stress of gift giving, so shopping for the holiday is a lot less about pressure and a lot more about joy.

“With Halloween, it’s less about the want and more about the fun,” confirms Ana Serafin Smith, director of media relations for the National Retail Federation (her miniature pinscher Apollo will be a skeleton this Halloween). “When it comes to pet costumes, people find it fun and funny to dress up their cat as a dog or dog as a hot dog or cat like a lion,” she says.

Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

It’s easy to lay this trend at the feet of millennials. (Because we’re not having kids so we sub in dogs! Or we spend our money on stupid things! Or it’s another thing we’re responsible for, just like killing the real estate market or Hooters because we just don’t understand!) But dressing up dogs isn’t exactly new, says Jody Miller-Young, a dog fashion designer who wrote about the history of canine couture on her website Bark & Swagger. (Her four dogs will have multiple costume changes.)

“I thought that the beginning of dog fashion would have begun somewhere in the 20th century — maybe in the teens or ’20s,” she says. “But it goes back far more than that.”

Way back. During the excavation of the tomb of King Cuo of Zhongshan, who was king of China from 327 to 309 BC, archeologists found two large dogs buried in jeweled collars. The greyhound of Louis XI, king of France from 1423 to 1483, wore a red velvet collar with 20 pearls and 11 rubies, and Louis’s successor, Charles VIII, had robes made for his dog and marmot, according to Medieval Pets. Queen Victoria dressed her dog in a “scarlet jacket and blue trousers,” as she wrote in her diaries, right around the time that dog couture shops became a thing in Paris.

Here in the US, the first pet cemetery was founded in Westchester, New York, in 1896 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The first of the eight-part “Dogs Playing Poker” was painted in 1903. (And the artist Cassius Marcellus Coolidge painted “Laying Down the Law,” featuring a dog as a lawyer, in 1840.)

In the 1910s, Harry Whittier Frees took pictures of cats getting married, cats at a picnic, a dog watering flowers, and a dog sewing pants that were used in postcards, kids’ books, and magazines. From 1929 to 1931, MGM made “All Barkie” Dogville Comedies that featured dogs doing very human things like dancing and going to war (a studio itself that had a real lion in its logo).

Philipp Kester/ullstein bild via Getty Images

How we’ve treated our pets has changed then. Where my grandfather’s childhood dog would have always lived outside (and even Snoopy lived in a dog house), today state and local governments are passing laws that make such a thing illegal in extreme temperatures.

Tish Derry, director of design and trend at Petco, says that pet costumes have “always been there as an undercurrent, over the last 10 years, it’s really been an astronomical rise in popularity and in spend.”

A lot more of us own dogs too. According to the American Pet Products Association, 68 percent of US households own a pet, which comes to about 85 million households. Of those 85 million households, 60.2 million own a dog. We spend a lot on our pets too: an estimated $72.13 billion in 2018, the highest number since the American Pet Products Association started tracking the statistic.

“We get health insurance for our dogs that in some cases is better than health insurance for ourselves,” says Kim Kavin, author of The Dog Merchants: Inside the Big Business of Breeders, Pet Stores, and Rescuers. “The logical outlet for this is when you take your kids out for trick or treating, you take the dog out too, and you want him to be part of the family and have a good costume.”

This growth in pet ownership dovetailed with the rise of social media — and social media kicked Halloween spending into high gear, says Serafin Smith of the National Retail Federation. “We started seeing an increase in Halloween spending about 10 years ago, and this was right around the time that social media started picking up,” says Smith. Instagram launched in 2010; now dogs like Marnie and Tuna have millions of followers.

“Everybody loves a cute dog or cat picture, but also you have the dog stars of Instagram pushing this massive trend to dress your dogs,” says Miller-Young.

Petco

Petco

Derry of Petco said that their designers are going for that Instagrammable moment. “Our design team is always focused on what’s going to get you the most likes,” she says, to the point she had a toy designer work on the line, who created more 3D costumes like pizza delivery person and a lumberjack.

Ada Nieves is a pet fashion designer and also spearheads New York City’s Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade, now in its 28th year. Last year, it attracted about 25,000 people. (This year it’s held at the East River Park Amphitheater because of last-minute insurance issues.) She says that pet costumes and clothes can make your dog look cute in photos, but it’s also another way of signaling to people that you care about your dog.

“When I see a person who takes time and effort to dress up their animals, even if it’s just for Halloween, is someone who pays attention to things that are more important, like spaying and neutering, health and nutrition,” she says. “Even if you spend $5, $10, it shows that you’re taking the effort and time and money to do something with your pet, so you’ll do other things that are important.”

The National Retail Federation predicts that the most popular costumes this year for cats and dogs will be pumpkin, hot dog, bumble bee, devil, cat, dog, lion, Star Wars characters, superhero, and ghost. So Annie Oakley Tater Tot as Captain America will be a bit on trend without being the most obvious dog costume of 2018. I imagine she doesn’t give a shit, though she’ll sit still for all the cookies I’ll give her to get a good photo to, of course, post online.

Though if you’re thinking of dressing up your chicken, beware: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that putting a costume on your chicken could spread a drug-resistant strain of salmonella that has infected 92 people in 29 states.

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