Most people you ask love a good Halloween celebration.
And yeah – many love the entire month, but they also have zero interest in putting on a full costume and makeup to celebrate.
And that leaves them feeling a bit out of place in a hoodie while the kids (and those “fun adults”) seem to have all the creative fun.
We’ve got your back. Whether you’re looking for a dressed-down Halloween idea or want to add another option to the season, here are some tips and tricks (see what we did there?) for this Halloween.
What Do You Wear on Halloween If You’re Not Dressing Up?
We did a quick search online to see what the most common result was for this question. And, as you might expect, the answers were less that exciting.
One that made us laugh? “How to build a passable cat out of eyeliner and a black turtleneck you already own.”
How fun.
The reality is that “doing Halloween without a costume” doesn’t mean improvising one out of your closet at 6 p.m. It means wearing clothes that happen to have ghosts on them – which is why the good ones work on October 3rd and October 31st.
A geek Halloween shirt does a job a costume can’t. It survives a full workday and doesn’t need touching up. Plus, nobody has to ask what you’re supposed to be.
Oh, and you can sit down in it - which is very important!
The whole point of a nerdy Halloween outfit built this way is that it stays an outfit. You put it on in the morning, and you’re still wearing it when the last trick-or-treater leaves.
The data seems to back up that most people need this more than they think. Here’s some interesting findings from the National Retail Federation’s 2025 Halloween survey. They asked 8,000 consumers for their opinions about Halloween, and found that:
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73% said they’d celebrate
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66% planned to hand out candy
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Only 51% planned to dress up
Handing out candy is the single most common Halloween activity in the country, and it beats costume-wearing by fifteen points.
That means the most typical Halloween experience in America involves an adult standing in a doorway, fully participating, wearing whatever they had on.
Our Halloween collection is built for that person.
Remember, Halloween Is a Season, Not Just One Night
Part of the costume dilemma is the cost of the whole thing.
You might spend somewhere between forty and a hundred dollars on a costume. But you only wear it for four hours.
Then it lives in the closet (or the storage unit) until you either forget about it or give it away.
But if you invest in a print you really like, it’ll get worn all of October. It then keeps going, because a lot of these designs aren’t strictly Halloween to begin with.
Julie Kitzes’ Fall Squirrel Button Up Shirt is one of our favorite examples of this kind of fit.
Nothing about it says October 31st. It says autumn. It will keep saying autumn into November while everyone else’s decorations are coming down. It’s subtle enough for the office and playful enough for cider runs, which is about right.
Episodic Drawing’s cottagecore Halloween mushroom print does the same thing from the other direction, with hand-drawn toadstools in shadow-and-autumn tones. It’s “woodland botany” most of the year – and then it’s slightly “witchy” the moment you pair it with a pumpkin.
The Office Problem
What about the office? If you’re working outside the home, then Halloween at work is often an awkward social contract. After all, wearing full makeup on a client call is a choice.
But so is being the only one who didn’t play along at a company that made a whole thing out of it.
A print solves it without any of the risk. Heather Davenport’s Dnd Dice Black Cats Button Up Shirt is a great one – black cats scattered among dice clusters, playful up close and just a nice pattern from across a conference table.
Tobe Fonseca’s Scaredy Cats Button Up Shirt runs a similar line, with arch-backed cats and puffed tails repeating across the whole shirt.
Ready for Candy Duty or Work Parties (Or Just Staying Comfortable)
Different Halloween jobs call for different levels of commitment – and different styles fit different activities.
Answering the door for trick-or-treaters? Then you’ll want something fun but easy. (And something that won’t freak out the kids too much.)
Ardi Tong’s Anxious Ghosts Purple Button Up Shirt is a crowd of visibly nervous little specters drifting across dark purple, and it gets a reaction from kids and parents both.
If your household runs more retro-gaming than haunted-house, Heather Davenport’s Pixel Ghost Button Up Shirt puts a very familiar shape in eight-bit form, and the adults will spot it before the kids do.
Heading to a party and want to look like you’ve at least tried? Go with the Witches Potion Brew Button Up. It’s the most committed thing in our collection, with swirling brews and witchy iconography in night-ready contrast.
Amy Brown has been painting faeries since 1994, and her Sweet Fairy Halloween Button Up Shirt is the softer version of the same idea.
But we’ve only talked about shirts. There’s more to the Halloween collection – sleeveless and full dresses, long-sleeve button-ups, curvy cuts, youth sizes, and bucket hats. And there’s also youth sizing, so matching is a go.
Halloween game night is its own category, and we’ve written the longer version of that one. Our game night style guide covers what you can wear.
How Spooky Do You Want to Go?
For different people, the concept of Halloween covers a lot of ground. But we want to make it easy to have fun on the day off, while still wearing something fun year-round.
That’s why there’s no gore in here. No slashers, no severed anything, nothing too crazy. The range runs from barely seasonal to fully committed
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Fall Squirrel and the mushroom print sit at one end
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Heather Davenport’s Spooky Halloween Orange and its purple counterpart land in the middle, with classic colorways doing classic Halloween things (her Skeleton Hanging Button Up Shirt is a great choice!)
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Witches Potion Brew anchors the far end. Nothing here needs a content warning, and plenty of it crosses over into the Botany and Fantasy collections. A lot of the mushrooms and ghosts live there year-round.
If your taste runs toward folklore rather than jack-o’-lanterns, our Cryptid Core piece makes the case for the year-round version of this look.
Why Wear A Costume When You Can Rock a Shirt With Ducks Wearing Costumes?
That’s the fun of it – you can get as meta as you want. Not feeling like putting on the full outfit?
Then throw on a shirt covered in rubber duckies wearing monster costumes. Nathan Winsor drew a parade of them, tiny ducks in tiny monster getups, marching across the entire shirt. It just makes sense.
The button-ups run XS through 5XL, with youth sizing and hats alongside them. All of it is made when you order it, printed with eco-friendly inks, and drawn by talented illustrators whom we know and trust.
Ready to add one to your collection? Have a look at the full Halloween collection and find the one that matches how much you actually want to explain yourself this year.
