WASHINGTON — With Halloween coming up fast, people are taking to the internet to work out what costume they’re going to buy or make. And Google’s rankings of the most searched-for costumes, as compiled by Fortune magazine, reflect that various people are looking for a mix of the trendy and the timeless.
Fortune Senior Editor Matt Heimer told WTOP that the No. 1 costume in Google searches was Wonder Woman, both nationwide and in the D.C. area.
It makes some sense, he said. “By one measure,” Heimer said, the “Wonder Woman” movie was “the one truly successful blockbuster of this year’s summer movie offerings.” Comic book characters generally make about 10 to 15 percent of the costume searches, “but Wonder Woman is ticking way, way up.”
Effort may have something to do with the popularity of various costumes, Heimer said. The long-popular rabbit costume, for example, can be a big, involved deal, but for a lot of people “really they’re just buying a pair of ears and sticking it on their head. It’s that kind of low-maintenance, low-commitment costume.”
On the other hand, Heimer was surprised by how many people were checking out unicorn costumes, which can take more planning and commitment than a lot of other choices.
“You’re still basically putting on a horse costume,” he said.
You’d think the popularity of the movie version of Stephen King’s “It” would have boosted the popularity of clown costumes, Heimer said, but it’s possible a lot of people are searching specifically for Pennywise, the evil clown from the movie.
The enduring popularity of the TV series “The Walking Dead” would seem to indicate that zombie costumes would be more popular, but Heimer theorizes that “anyone who wants a zombie costume already has one.”
Heimer is heartened in general by the fact that, while movie characters tend to take the top spots, the ones that aren’t often “pegged to major media things I’m thinking clown, rabbit, witch, pirate … are sort of the go-to’s.”
He adds, “They come back year after year after year, and it’s interesting that they have an enduring popularity that the brand-driven ones do not. And I think that says something about people’s imagination — namely that we still have some.”
Find out the rest of the national top 10 and D.C.’s top 5.
