Get Inspired by History’s Most Scandalous and Stunning Costumes

Have you picked your Halloween costume yet?

There’s still time, especially if you’re willing to brave the crowded, rubber mask–scented aisles of a costume store. There’s the standard witch hats and skeleton suits, tiny princess and superhero costumes for children, and supplies to dress as whatever’s in the pop-culture water. I imagine that this year, in 2024, we’ll be seeing a lot of Beetlejuices and Rayguns.

On the higher end, celebrities don’t hit up Spirit Halloween for their costumes. Think Heidi Klum and her eye-popping, sometimes stomach-churning ensembles. Less costumes and more works of art, they grab headlines and eyeballs around the world.

Long before Klum wiggled into a worm suit, people have been using costumes to shock and scandalize. It’s easy to imagine the wealthy and powerful of yesteryear disdaining anything so gauche as a costume party, but even royals once racked their brains for disguises that would show off their wealth, beauty, taste, or cleverness.

This wasn’t confined to one day a year, either. Masquerades and fancy-dress balls were fashionable events that could happen in any season. And some of these costumes became so well-known—or notorious—that they were gossiped about for centuries.

The Dawn of Fancy Dress

The European tradition of costume dates back to pre-Christian times. That’s according to Benjamin Wild, the author of Carnival to Catwalk: Global Reflections on Fancy Dress Costume. “Wearing costumes was often associated with changes in the season,” he explains. “When people are going through changes in terms of the harvesting of crops, when they’re going through changes because of the temperatures, really seismic changes in terms of how they’re living their lives, these pivotal moments in people’s life cycles become occasions for civic celebration.”

Some of these traditions endured well after the introduction of Christianity, such as the evil-dispelling Kukeri dancers of Bulgaria. But even observant Christians used costumes as a way to note the changing of the seasons and the passage of time. Carnival especially became a time of masked revelry and relaxed social mores: a peasant could be a king for a day, and a king could goof off in relative anonymity. In 17th-century Italy, pre-Lent festivities had celebrants dressing up or disguising themselves with masks and “domino” cloaks, and classes mingled in the streets for people-watching, music, and other entertainment.

Masked Mayhem

Masquerade balls burst onto the English social scene in the early 18th century. John James Heidegger, a Swiss impresario famous for his creativity and “the excessive ugliness of his face,” launched a series of masked balls at London’s Haymarket Opera House in 1710. He had been inspired by the Italian masquerade tradition, but the British dances soon took on lives of their own, expanding into public pleasure gardens and even becoming parties that people could attend regularly with purchased subscriptions.

Much like today, there were costume trends. There were the curly wigs, feathered hats, and floppy boots of “Vandyke” costumes, which were a callback to the reign of Charles I and the paintings of Anthony Van Dyck from the 1600s. There were also many outfits inspired by the Ottoman Empire, a fascination for many Europeans: Lady Villars, at a ball in May of 1772, arrived dressed as “a Sultana with an astonishing quantity of diamonds supposed to the value of thirty thousand pounds,” reported one magazine.

Sartorial Scandals

The 18th century also saw a number of famously scandalous costumes. In her book The Dress Worn at Masquerades in England, 1730 to 1790, Aileen Ribeiro notes two specific costumes that became legendary for their shock value.

At a masquerade in 1749, Elizabeth Chudleigh, a future duchess, showed up dressed as the doomed Mycenaean princess Iphigenia from Greek legend. Many depictions exist of what she wore that night, but most show a transparent dress that, while layered to cover her bottom half, left her chest completely exposed: a choice that would be daring today, much less in 1749. Men could wear scandalous costumes as well, like when a certain Captain Watson showed up to a ball in 1770 dressed as Adam from the Bible, in “flesh-colored silk with an apron of fig leaves.” An account published in 1865, nearly a century later, described how other party-goers jumped when he approached, “imagining him to be really naked.”

The powerful and not-so-powerful took masquerades as an opportunity to mix, resulting in a number of scandalous situations. “There’s a really fun story from the 18th century where King George II is at a masquerade ball in London, and he’s dressed in historical English clothing, he’s completely anonymous,” says Wild. “Nobody recognizes him, so much so that one of the king’s subjects asks him if he will hold their cup. The king is delighted by this.”

But this masked, anonymous mixing also made some people very nervous. Women could attend masquerades unchaperoned, and “when you’re bringing lots of people together, there is the potential for people to criticize the natural order,” says Wild. In 1724, the artist William Hogarth published a print criticizing popular entertainments of the day, showing Londoners eagerly following a satyr and a fool into a doorway marked “Masquerade,” with a banner depicting opera singers hanging overhead. In the center of the print, a vendor is selling the works of celebrated playwrights such as Shakespeare and Dryden as waste paper. His message was clear: Traditional culture was being overlooked in favor of salacious foreign fun. The outcry from religious authorities and the press focused on all the immoral possibilities of masked merriment. Ribeiro notes that in 1729, the Grand Jury of Middlesex proclaimed Heidegger “the principal promoter of vice and immorality.” Two decades later, Heidegger died at age 90, beloved and well-off.

Dressing Up and Dressing Down

In the 19th century, everything changed. “The idea of masquerade in the 18th century—of different classes mingling—is largely over,” says Wild. Instead, fancy-dress balls became exclusive private events. Wild notes that Queen Victoria in particular had a hand in this formal turn. In 1842, she commissioned a dress historian to design her and Prince Albert’s outfits for her Bal Costumé that year, representing Edward III and his wife, Queen Philippa. Many aristocrats, Wild says, dressed as nobility from previous generations to tout their own genealogies, bloodlines, and “authenticities as leaders.”

Many decades later, the Devonshire House Ball of 1897 was held in London to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. While the queen herself did not attend, many other royals did. Czar Nicholas II of Russia and the tsarina were there, in 18th-century court dress, as well as Prince Victor Duleep Singh, son of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, dressed as the 16th-century Emperor Akbar. “Stories of that fancy dress ball and what people are wearing [circulate] around the world for months afterwards,” says Wild.

It wasn’t just women who showed up in fabulous costumes to these events. The dress code at the Devonshire House Ball limited attendees to wearing either allegorical costumes or historical outfits from before the year 1815. Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, showed up dressed to impress as Louis Philippe, the 18th-century French ambassador to the court of Catherine II. His suit, embroidered with diamonds and pearls, was shockingly expensive. As Wild notes in Carnival to Catwalk, the final bill for the House of Worth–designed outfit came out to more than $1.1 million in today’s dollars.

Non-royals could dress as queens and aristocrats too, of course. But according to Anthea Jarvis in her book Fancy Dress, “to dress as an Italian peasant gave the upper class English girl the opportunity of wearing a charming picturesque costume, and of displaying fashionable democratic tendencies (if vague ones) as well.” For elites wanting to cosplay as commoners, guides abounded. In the popular book Fancy dress described: or, what to wear at fancy balls, partygoers could read alphabetized costume descriptions for outfits befitting peasantry from Abruzzi, Austria, or Auvergne, while the Bs contained instructions for Basque, Breton, and Burmese peasant costumes.

Victorians also stretched the limits of their creativity by dressing up as ideas and concepts. New technologies, seasons, places, and meteorological events could all become costumes. A number of designs from the groundbreaking House of Worth fashion house show the breadth of creativity of designers of the era. Designer Léon Sault drew an incredible costume simply called Hell: a red skirt covered in cavorting devils, a bodice decorated with an owl in flight, all topped with a glorious headdress consisting of flames and a perching devil. Sault would also design more wholesomely wondrous costumes in this era, ranging from Rainbow to Flower Basket to Dawn.

Fancy Dress as Flex

The fancy-dress ball was not only a European phenomenon. In 1867, the American singer Fanny Ronalds famously combined a mythical character and concept in her costume as Euterpe, or the muse of music. At a ball she hosted at the iconic Delmonico’s restaurant in Manhattan, she wore a yellow dress embroidered with the lyrics to Verdi’s opera Un ballo en maschera, a green cape decorated with musical instruments, and a lyre-shaped crown lit from below by real fire, fueled with gas.

As the world industrialized, a handful of Americans acquired staggering wealth that they were eager to show off. In 1883, Alva Vanderbilt held an enormous costume ball at her new mansion on Fifth Avenue, inviting 1,200 elite guests to show up wearing their best. Her sister-in-law Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt won the night in her “Electric Light” dress, holding a light bulb in her hand that was powered by a battery inside her gown. Commissioned from the House of Worth and embroidered with lightning bolts, the dress symbolized two Gilded Age preoccupations: new technology and fabulous amounts of money. “Electricity is still very much in its infancy in terms of being widespread, even for the very wealthiest in New York,” says Wild. “The amount of money that people in the 19th century and early 20th century, particularly, are spending on costumes is just astronomical.”

In this era, costumes were often shocking because of how expensive they were, with reporters breathlessly relating the prices of outfits and jewelry in the papers. But, says Wild, this wasn’t always organic news coverage. “Often, there’s very rich, elaborate descriptions that we read in 19th century accounts of fancy-dress balls,” he explains. “When we read about them in newspapers, that’s the actual wearers themselves sending those descriptions into the newspaper to the journalist, telling them, ‘I’m wearing this, I bought it from here and I bought it from there.’” Many of the wealthy, he noted, mixed expensive, imported clothing with fake jewelry, and passed it off as real, “making their costumes look more expensive than they actually [were] to gain social kudos.”

However, some people still wore costumes that would be considered scandalous today for reasons other than the cost. At the Vanderbilt ball, socialite Kate Strong dressed as a white cat. But her costume didn’t involve a cat-ear headband. Instead, the New York Times reported, she wore “an overskirt made entirely of white cats’ tails sewed on a dark background.” On her head she wore a “stiffened white cat’s skin, [a cat’s] head over the forehead… and the tail [pendant] behind.” In the picture of Strong posing in her costume, it’s obvious that the cat on her head was not a clever stuffed replica, but a real taxidermied cat.

Backlash & Bombs

Much like today, though, the media’s coverage of these events could anger the public. Disgust over the extravagance of elite parties and the unimaginably expensive costumes worn by the powerful surrounded one particular American ball held in 1897.

Cornelia and Bradley Martin rented out the Waldorf Hotel on February 10, and guests were asked to attend dressed in historical fashion. Cornelia, who planned the event, had lofty ambitions. Her aim, reported the New York Times prior to the event, was to “surpass the famous Vanderbilt function” of 1883. She and her husband bent their considerable wealth to the task of throwing a party unlike any the world had ever seen.

Cornelia’s other announced aim was to stimulate the local economy by sending out invitations only shortly before the event, “as to afford no time for the ordering of costumes from abroad,” the New York Times reported. When a prominent clergyman went on the record saying that the lavishness of the party was a sorry use of money and would make the poor feel resentful of the rich, opinions and arguments about the morality of such an event filled newspapers across the country, with articles tallying up the number of locals lucky enough to snag an invitation. Columnists interviewed other clergymen about the ball, creating a firestorm of publicity for the party. Tension was so high that, two days before the ball, someone sent a bomb to the Martin home.

The bomb didn’t go off, so the party went on. On February 10, thousands of sightseers thronged around the Waldorf. The interior, decked out with valuable tapestries and rich floral arrangements, dazzled the guests. The costumes were fabulous, too, with attendees dressed as everything from bejeweled royalty to glamorous shepherdesses. It was undoubtedly one of the most lavish and expensive private celebrations ever held in New York to that point, yet many accounts of the night agreed that there was no way for it to live up to the high expectations set by the media uproar. According to the New York Times, only half of those invited actually attended, perhaps due to the media furor. (It didn’t help that many of the young men abandoned the dance floor after midnight to dedicate themselves to the open buffet.)

While the opulence of the event and the costumes themselves were enough to scandalize society, some people still could shock by what they wore. The artist Otho Cushing was disapprovingly mentioned in the New York Times for the execution of his costume. As an Italian falconer from the 15th century, he wore a costume that was “historically correct in every detail.” That meant long hair, a cap, a short jacket, a stuffed falcon perched on one arm, and tights. The tights were the problem, since they “left little to the imagination as far as the figure was concerned,” the Times grimly reported. Like his forebear Captain Watson, “he caused a sensation wherever he moved.”

Costumes as Connection

A costume can spark gossip, express an opinion, or mark a moment of freedom for its wearer. “One of the things I’ve argued is that, throughout human history, fancy dress and costume is very much a social coping mechanism,” says Wild. Dressing up as someone or something else, if only for a night can be powerful. “It’s a way that we are negotiating between our individual and our social lives,” Wild adds. After all, people make and wear costumes to show them to others. No matter the era, “those almost primordial desires that we have as individuals to connect with something larger than ourselves, to be part of our society, to express that belonging, still come out.” At the very least, a stunning—or shocking—costume gives us all something to talk about. But you might want to be careful about what you wear this coming Halloween: People might still be talking about it in 200 years.