How the Pirate Got His Costume: Blackbeard, a Painter, and Every Halloween Since

Oil painting of Blackbeard climbing over a ship's rail at night with smoking fuses under his hat and ribbons braided into his beard, holding a lantern while frightened sailors raise their hands, titled How the Pirate Got His Costume

Walk down any Halloween costume aisle and you'll find a pirate. Red bandana. Striped sash. Big boots. Maybe an eye patch. It's one of the most popular Halloween costumes of all time.

It's also almost completely made up.

The real story of the pirate costume takes two men to tell. One was the scariest pirate who ever lived. The other was a painter from Delaware.

Blackbeard: the original Halloween costume

Blackbeard's real name was Edward Teach. He sailed the Caribbean and the American coast for only a couple of years, around 1717 and 1718. He didn't become famous for how many ships he took. He became famous for how he looked when he took them.

A pirate history book from 1724 describes him like this:

His black beard was long, thick, and grew all the way up to his eyes.
He twisted it into little braids and tied them with ribbons.
Before a fight, he tucked slow-burning fuses under his hat and lit them.

Those fuses were the kind sailors used to fire cannons. So when Blackbeard climbed over the side of a ship, he came wrapped in smoke, with a braided beard, a chest full of pistols and a big grin. The book says you couldn't picture anything from the underworld looking scarier.

And that was the whole idea.

Why did Blackbeard dress like that?

To win without fighting. If a ship's crew took one look at Blackbeard and gave up, he didn't have to risk a battle. The smoke, the braids and the ribbons were a costume in every sense. He put them on to become somebody much scarier than himself.

One fun footnote: historians think that 1724 book liked a good story, and it may have dressed Blackbeard up a little more on the page. So his costume actually got better after he was gone.

It didn't save him in the end. In November 1718, the British Navy caught Blackbeard off Ocracoke Inlet in North Carolina. But his look never went away.

Where did the pirate costume come from?

Here's the part almost nobody knows. For more than 150 years after Blackbeard, nobody really knew what pirates had looked like. There were almost no pictures of real ones.

Then, in 1887, an American artist named Howard Pyle started painting pirates for magazines. He had to decide for himself what they should look like.

So he made it up. He dug through old prints and costume records, borrowed ideas from Romani clothing and filled in the rest with his imagination. His pirates wore:

Bright scarves and bandanas
Colorful sashes around the waist
Loose, flowing shirts
Tall boots

Historians say the outfit made no sense for working on a real ship. Nobody cared. It looked exactly the way a pirate should look.

How Howard Pyle dressed every pirate since

The look stuck. Pyle's students carried it into more books. Silent films copied it. Then came the classic swashbuckler movies, and later the big pirate movies of today. Almost every pirate you've ever seen on a screen traces back to Pyle's paintbrush.

So when you tie on that red bandana this Halloween, you're not dressing like a real pirate. You're dressing like Howard Pyle's idea of one.

Halloween every day at the Pirate Lounge

So the classic Halloween pirate costume is really two costumes in one. Blackbeard's was built to scare a crew into giving up. Howard Pyle's was built to thrill everybody else.

Around here, we have a saying. It's Halloween every day at the Pirate Lounge. Why? Because we get to wear costumes, but to us, it feels normal.

This year, Pirate Cigar at Darkwater Alley in Pinellas Park is making it a whole weekend:

Friday, October 30: the Halloween costume party
Saturday, October 31: Halloween all day, with snacks and movies. Come as you are after trick-or-treating.
Sunday, November 1: Día de los Muertos. Calm and easy, costumes and face paint welcome.

Braid your beard. Tie on the sash. Just leave the lit fuses at home.

Quick answers

Where did the pirate costume come from? Mostly from Howard Pyle, an American artist who started painting pirates in 1887. His scarves, sashes and boots became the look that movies and Halloween costumes still copy.

What did Blackbeard really look like? A 1724 book says he had a long black beard braided with ribbons and wore lit, smoking fuses under his hat to scare his enemies.

Did real pirates wear bandanas and sashes? Some sailors wore scarves, but the full bandana, sash and boots look is mostly Howard Pyle's invention.