venta

Some time ago, on a pub crawl, my dance team happened on a bunch of people in fancy dress in north Oxford. They were dressed as superheroes and were an impressive bunch, both in outfits and in variety.

rapperaddict and I spent a happy quarter of an hour covertly spotting the various more obscure charaters. There was an impressively muscled Robin, a curvy Silk Spectre, a Spiderman... around twenty, a couple of whom we couldn't identify.

What almost all of them had in common was that they were dressed ready-made costumes. The sort you can buy on the internet for £20-£30, and wear once before the cheap fabric splits at the seams and the accessories are lost or broken. They look good for your one party night, of course. The rather obviously home-made Nebula[*], with patchy blue face paint, looked very much outclassed.

<engage nostalgia mode>

Back in my day, we all had to make our own costumes. Fancy-dress hire (and it would be hire, not purchase) was expensive. A fancy-dress party was as much a challenge of creativity as it was about actually dressing up. Coming up with your own costume (or a suitably creative excuse for a lack thereof), and then marvelling at other people's outfits.

Of course, I did live for ten years with Frances, who is a past master of creating fantastically complex or unexpected costumes. I still remember the time she bought a packet of purple balloons and went to a party as a blackberry. But her spider outfit (involving three pairs of black evening gloves) was a masterpiece.

I think the most I've ever spent on fancy-dress kit was buying a £15 curly red wig the year I went to the RPGSoc Christmas party as Ragged Robin. It was a good wig, too. I only spent that much because I expected to use it again - sadly, it was a casualty of the house move the following year, and hasn't been seen since.

These days, I can probably afford to spent £20 on a party outfit. But what bugs me is the waste of it. Cheap fancy dress items are disposable clothes; even if they survive the evening, the chances of you having the space and inclination to store them until the next time you're invited to a relevant party are slim.

At New Year, I was bidden to a party where the fancy-dress theme was "unlikely or rubbish superheroes". I went as Wander Woman (in the face of danger, she... wanders off), wearing an outfit made of clothes I already owned and £1.69-worth of gold cardboard.

The thing is, you don't actually need to be a carbon-copy of your chosen character for people to work out who you are. My Wonder-Woman-inspired outfit looked basically nothing like Wonder Woman (because, as you might be aware, I lack her pneumatic curves, her voluminous black hair, and her natty line in backless Stars-and-Stripes leotards). But my cardboard headband was plenty for the party hostess - dressed as BirdLady (Is it a bird...? Yes, yes it is...) - to identify me.

Reday-to-wear-costumes provide an easy solution for those lacking in inspiration, or time. But they're never as much fun. And if you make your own out of last decade's cast-off clothes and some string, at least you know no-one else will show up looking the same :)

And because apparently nothing on the internet is complete these days without a picture, here's a rather grainy picture of me dressed as Wander Woman.
Venta, dressed in black and red as Wander Woman