Making your Halloween costume is a great way to save money while being a little less cookie-cutter than the typical costume you would buy at the store. The best DIY Halloween costumes are simple, easy to execute and instantly recognizable. Here are a few of the best, easiest and most versatile Halloween costumes you can make from items you probably have at home already. Some are classic and some are more current, but they’re all fun and incredibly simple.
Waldo, of Where’s Waldo fame, is absolutely one of the easiest and most recognizable Halloween costumes to recreate. That’s probably why it’s also a very popular costume. All you need is dark pants, white tennis shoes, and a red- and white-striped shirt. A red- and white-striped hat and round black glasses will complete the look and get you bonus points. A striped shirt in those colors can sometimes be hard to find, so feel free to draw in red marker on a white t-shirt.
This is a very easy costume that everyone will understand, and you can wear practically anything you want. To keep with the theme, you might want to wear a white or light neutral outfit, or you can go with something glittery or something rainbow-colored. The only required aspect to this costume is a horn, which you can make out of paper, cardboard, foam, felt … there are tons of possibilities. You can also go exactly as far as you’d like when deciding how to decorate the horn. You can match it to whatever outfit you’re wearing or you can make the classic, swirled, cream-colored horn. If necessary, basic supplies can be purchased at Target for a few bucks.
This is one of the easiest outfits to throw together with little notice. A chambray shirt, a pair of jeans, and something red in your hair is really all you need. Bright red lipstick, which can be bought at stores like Sephora if you don’t have any, is also helpful, but not required. As long as you’re ready to flex your muscles in every picture, you’re good to go. Obviously, the closer you can get to having your hair like Rosie’s, the more accurate your costume will be, but it’s definitely going to be recognizable either way.
Though Minions have been popular for a few years, the Minion movie just came out, so this is still a very current costume. All you need is jeans or jean shorts, black shoes, a yellow shirt and to glue paper cups (with drawn-in eyes) to a headband. Overalls would be slightly more accurate, but they’re definitely not necessary. Feel free to speak gibberish and yell about bananas all night. The minions all have slight differences, so if you want to try to pick one to emulate, you can change your hair or your headband to match them.
The ultimate lazy costume, but also pretty relevant for our internet-obsessed age, is a 404 error. All you have to do is write “404 Error – Costume not found” on a t-shirt. It takes two minutes and a white t-shirt, and it’s not popular enough that everyone’s already seen it, so you can look extremely clever and culturally relevant, while being completely comfortable. Another great part of this is you can wear whatever outfit you want that goes with a white shirt. So you can wear pants, shorts, a skirt, whatever, and the costume still works.
Disneybounding is the concept of dressing up like a Disney character, but with an everyday outfit. It’s increasingly popular and people do it on normal days, but it’s a concept that can easily be applied to Halloween. You just look at what any character is wearing and recreate it with what you have in your closet. So say you wanted to be Cinderella. You can Disneybound that by wearing a light blue shirt and jeans and light-colored shoes. It’s a very casual way to still dress up without buying anything or going all out for a costume. People may not know who you are right away, but if you give them a hint, they’ll usually be able to grasp it if you’ve done a good job.
