Inflatable costume
Costume inflated around the wearer
An inflatable costume or air-inflated costume is a costume that is inflated around the wearer by means of a battery-powered blower that sucks air into the costume. These costumes usually stand 9–10 feet (2.7–3.0 m) tall when inflated.
Inflatable costumes are typically used by mascots and started appearing in the 1990s. One of the first inflatable mascots was Lil' Red of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Most NBA teams own an inflatable costume.
In the UK inflatable costumes are becoming more popular, and many people are wearing them for fun at parties etc. These are smaller versions of the costumes worn by mascots in the US. They are used by stepping into the costume, turning on the small electric fan and then pulling a drawstring at the neck, and the costumes quickly inflate.
Popular costumes include the inflatable sumo wrestler, ballerina, cowboy, cow costume, pig costume, T-Rex costume and chicken costume.
An inflatable Tyrannosaurus rex costume was a bestseller on Amazon in the U.S. in 2019.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Inflatable costume” as costume inflated around the wearer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6030131. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Inflatable costume” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.