Fancy Dress

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Fancy dress may have close parallels with other realms reliant on costuming, including theatre, drag, folk celebrations, historic re-enactments and more serious forms of disguise, but the focus here is largely on attire ‘made for a specific occasion, sometimes from […] surprising materials’. It was fascinating watching them both satisfying their curiosity, trying things out and, especially in William’s case, getting more and more tired through the day. And then, over a week or so last month, people across the globe united to obsess over a 1983 book, Jane Asher’s Fancy Dress, which promises “Over 100 costumes for children and adults and how to make them”.

Can’t see them flying around, but sometimes catch sight of one on your skin when you feel a sharp sting. And, if you missed them, here are links to the shows where Jessica Lee Morgan and Dan Tiernan joined me in the studio.Turning off the personalized advertising setting won’t stop you from seeing Etsy ads, but it may make the ads you see less relevant or more repetitive. Friends of ours who attended later said they had a wonderful time, despite the short, sharp torrential downpour late in the afternoon. You didn’t have to be overweight to be squished between your neighbours, and in our case, one of those neighbours was a complete stranger.

As is often the case, I didn’t get much of the poetry, it needs more study maybe, but I enjoyed her use of language. Again, I promised myself that one day, I will take my real camera to the riverside and try to get some really good quality shots.Anyway, we dropped the bag of old batteries off at the tip, and the man there even said he’d drop them off in the right place for us. We wandered around the corner to the playground in Riverside Park which was fun, although we were all disappointed by the amount of litter flying about. As Verity Wilson’s abundantly illustrated new study Dressing Up: A History of Fancy Dress in Britain shows, Asher’s book is no outlier, but part of a time-honoured tradition. The plan was to go into Manchester by bus, but after waiting for over twenty minutes, we resorted to Plan B.

The Mall was empty and I, again, reminded Liesel that I had ridden my bike here: crikey, that was 9 years ago now, that Prudential 100-mile ride around the Surrey countryside and streets of London. I inherited none of his skills, I can sew a button on, that’s about all, but in the way that quarantine makes you sort of aspirational about what skills you are going to acquire, I took it home and thought, maybe I’ll try this.It’s unfair to fault the book for fidelity to the facts, but with a topic as rich and silly as this, one occasionally wishes for a little more in the way of play.