Technology | 2010.01.30
My costume dramas | Holly Walsh
Put more thought into your fancy dress themes, people. Tarts and vicars just won\'t cut it
Next weekend I\'ve got to go to a fancy dress party. Which I\'d quite look forward to if the theme weren\'t "tarts and vicars". As the daughter of a female vicar, the last thing I want to do is go to a party dressed as my mother (although this is only a matter of time. I\'ve already found myself flicking through the Lands\' End catalogue and eyeing up Ecco shoes).
Don\'t get me wrong – I bloody love a fancy dress party. I take them very seriously. I\'ve been known to take a sick day from work to make a costume. But this tarts and vicars thing annoys me because it\'s just so unoriginal. I like a party with a theme that makes demands of the imagination. A good fancy dress costume is all about lateral thinking; you have to consider the most obvious thing you could go as, and then work backwards. The best Halloween costume I\'ve ever seen was someone who arrived in a long white tube with a little round window, and two blue lines painted across their face. They\'d come as a pregnancy scare.
The fancy dress challenge is more complicated for women, who must battle against any temptation to Just Make It Sexy. Look through anyone\'s photos and eventually you\'ll come across some fancy dress party where the girls are all dressed as either sexy cats or sexy devils. The theme? Presumably "half-heartedness". If sexy cats and sexy devils are the default costumes for women, the default for men is James Bond – whatever the brief.
A couple of years ago I went to a party where the theme was "sea creatures". Now, you\'d have thought you couldn\'t make "sea creatures" sexy, and you\'d be right, which is why most women had come as sexy cats, lamely claiming to be catfish. I\'d come as a giant king prawn. The other women looked at me like I was a dick, even though my papier-mâché shell was anatomically spot on. The men came as James Bond.
Take note of the papier-mâché point here. The best fancy dress costumes are always home-made. There\'s something delightfully stupid about a giant Facebook page made of cardboard, with the wearer\'s head poking through for the profile picture. You couldn\'t buy it in a shop, and it probably won\'t last the night, but it was made especially for the occasion.
Hiring an elaborate costume might look slicker, but I think it\'s a bit of a cop-out. Just once, I\'d like to see Elton John and David Furnish throw one of their massive charity balls where all the celebrities have to make their own costumes. Imagine David and Victoria up till past midnight the night before adding the finishing touches to their cardboard robot costumes. Or Liz Hurley on the cover of Heat dressed as a wonky pirate.
Of course, there are some parts of a costume that are harder to make than others, and that\'s where the party shop comes in. My local high street has changed radically in the last couple of years because of the recession. Supermarkets, banks and Woolworths have disappeared, but somehow the party shop has stayed open, despite the fact that most people I know only buy a pair of Austin Powers glasses once in a lifetime. I discovered something of an unlikely fancy dress mecca recently, in Galway on the west coast of Ireland. Over the course of a weekend, I found half a dozen fancy dress shops. That\'s a lot of pretending for one town. Presumably the low sales of Salvador Dalí moustaches are offset by the booming popularity of sexy cat ears.
For the guest, fancy dress is a chance to show off. For the host, it\'s a test to see how much effort your friends are willing to make for you. Which is why, even though I think the theme is a bit dull, I\'m going to push the boat out next weekend. It\'s no mere vicar for me. I\'m going as the archbishop of Canterbury – complete with homemade mitre, hand-stitched vestments and a full-sized crosier. I\'ve worn it once before – to the 2003 annual synod – and let me tell you, that was one hell of an after-party.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ancy-dress-homemade-archbishop
