Costumes - The term costume can refer to wardrobe and dress in general. It can also refer to the distinctive style of dress of a particular people, class, or period. Costume may also refer to the artistic arrangement of accessories in a picture, statue, poem, or play, appropriate to the time, place, or other circumstances represented or described, or to a particular style of clothing worn to portray the wearer as a character or type of character other than their regular persona at a social event such as a masquerade, a fancy dress party or in an artistic theatrical performance.
Costumes also serve as an avenue for children to explore and role-play. Children can dress up in various forms; for example characters from history or fiction like pirates, princesses or cowboys, common jobs like nurses or police officers, or animals such as those seen in zoos or farms. This type of play can stimulate the imagination and help children to develop their creative side.
A great example of costume wear is on Halloween. Halloween costumes are costumes worn on or around Halloween, a festival which falls on October 31. The Halloween costume has a fairly short history. Wearing costumes has long been associated with other holidays around the time of Halloween, even Christmas. Among the earliest references to wearing costumes at Halloween is in 1895, where "guisers" are recorded in Scotland but there is almost no mention of a costume in England, Ireland, or the United States until the early 1900’s. Early costumes emphasized the pagan and Gothic nature of the Halloween holiday, but by the 1930s costumes based on characters in mass media such as film, literature, and radio became popular as Halloween costumes.
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