Dustin from Stranger Things Costume

This is my son, Hendrix(4 years old) as Dustin from Stranger Things(season 3). Over the Summer, my kids became obsessed with Stranger Things series and would binge-watch all 3 seasons over and over and over again. My son fell in love with Dustin’s character and specifically the Neverending Story scene with Suzie-poo towards the end of season 3 and he decided that’s what he wanted to be for Halloween this year. I was so excited that he picked a character from Stranger Things because our whole family loves the show and all of the characters! I quickly got to work researching Dustin’s costume so that I could start piecing it all together and planning out what materials I would need.

The first thing I ordered was Dustin’s hat. I knew right from the get-go that I probably wasn’t going to find a child-sized hat to work with and would need to make an adult hat work. I didn’t think that my son was going to tolerate wearing a wig, so I had to figure out a way to add Dustin’s famous dark-brown curly locks to the hat. I ended up finding doll hair extensions and ordered a few different pieces of curly brown hair extension wefts. I decided that I wanted my son to be able to wear the hat just by itself if he got tired/annoyed of wearing the hair, so the hair had to be removable from the hat. I took the wefts of hair and glued them on top of each other because one weft wasn’t going to be thick enough on its own, so I needed to create some volume. I think each hair piece had about 4-5 weft layers stacked on top of each other. Once I had achieved the thickness I wanted, I glued strips of Velcro(the soft side) to the inside rim of the hat and then glued the hair pieces to the mirrored Velcro strips. I then attached the hair pieces and tried it on my son to see how it looked. The doll hair extensions were about 8” long, so they were a little too long for my liking and I had to trim about 4” off to create a more desired length. I wasn’t sure how the hat would look on my son and if it would look the way I had envisioned, but it actually looked so dang cute on him.

For the shorts, I was originally going to try to find some similar light olive green herringbone material to make the shorts, but ended up just getting some plain olive green cotton fabric and whipping up some simple shorts for him to wear. They were close enough lol

Next, I had to find Dustin’s bright orange “Roast Beef” t-shirt. I was able to order a youth sized shirt that I found on Etsy for about $20, but when it came the orange color was more of a neon orange and was much different than what I thought I’d receive. So I had to contact the shop and the owner said that that’s what color the shirts were for the youth sized t-shirts with the roast beef graphic. He then showed me a different color orange t-shirt in an adult size and that color was much more accurate to the color Dustin wore on the show. I had him resize the graphic a bit because I knew I was going to have to re-size the shirt to fit my son and needed the graphic to be proportionate for a toddler t-shirt. After I received the new shirt, I sized it down to a 3T size and it turned out great!

Once I had finished the t-shirt, I had to draw out a pattern for Dustin’s Denim cargo vest. So, I drew out my pattern and then drew out patterns for the pockets. On Dustin’s vest in the show he had a vintage 1985 Nasa STS-51D space mission patch on the right side(it was actually a failed Nasa mission), so I had to try to find one. Luckily, I was able to find the same authentic vintage 1985 Nasa patch on eBay for a good price. When I received it, it was much larger than I had anticipated, so I had to re-configure how to display this large patch on the vest and still have room for all of the utility pockets. I sewed the vest up and then sewed on all of the pockets. Because I had forgotten to buy the correct snap hardware for the pockets, I had to improvise with what I had on hand. I ended up using some metallic studs on the pockets to give the illusion that they were snaps, so the pockets weren’t functional at all sadly. I was pretty happy with how the vest turned out overall, though, and I think was close enough to Dustin’s vest.

The ribbed socks I found from Hanna Andersson and they worked out perfectly. The sneakers are from Old Navy and I bought them used(Dustin wore Reebok sneakers in the show, but wasn’t able to find any in my son’s size). I ordered the bright orange laces from either Etsy or eBay. The headset we already had.

We debuted his Dustin costume at LA Comic Con this year and he was also in the kids cosplay contest. It was the cutest thing ever when he walked on stage and started singing the Neverending story song, he definitely won over the crowd by doing that! The overall response to his cosplay costume was awesome and he did such a great job wearing it all day! It worked out perfectly for him to wear at comic con because they actually had a Stranger Things scene displayed that people were able to use to take photos, so it was pretty cool to get some cute photos of him in his costume next to the demogorgon and on the Byers’ couch with the famous alphabet/Christmas lights display on the wall. I hope you guys enjoy our take on Dustin and thank you for looking! :)