Ladies Fancy Dress: Think beyond the sexy
It’s Halloween Eve, 2010. Dressed in a Sexy Vampire costume, the typical no-money-half-arsed effort with sexy gratuitously thrown in, I wait with baited breath for my best friend to arrive en route to a party. He presently shows up on my doorstep clad in nothing more than a green mankini. Not only has he decided to sport this dubious garment (homemade, I have been reliably informed), but he has painted himself yellow and is wearing a green swimming cap and clutching a wand. He has decided to spend Halloween dressed as a magic lizard. Obviously.
But that is the great thing about fancy dress. At its very core is the sense of illusion, disguise and complete anonymity. Pretending to be someone you’re not; something you can never be, or perhaps simply a better version of yourself. For one night only you can display a side of yourself that you would never normally show: a social outcast transformed into a sex goddess with the help of a pre-packaged, mass-manufactured Jessica Rabbit costume. A nervous breakdown calling himself a magician. A dull Nigel metamorphosed into a psychotic Patrick Bateman complete with slicked back hair and an even slicker business card. Magic.
Three blue, human-shaped stains were left on my friend’s wall in the aftermath of Halloween ‘09. It transpired that a triumvirate of gate-crashing Smurfs from the party next door were the culprits; they were subsequently lumped with the bill for painting over the blue-tinged blobs they had left.
Women seeking ladies fancy dress costumes face two choices: they can either go as something sexy or they can go as something sexy. For boys, the purpose of fancy dress is frankly to shock, whether this is trying to outdo each other in terms of grotesqueness or seeing how much flesh they can get away with showing before they can be considered naked. The latter objective is one that’s also shared by the girls. No matter what the occasion or costume, it has to be sexy. As a case in point, try browsing the Halloween section of any fancy dress website and seeing if you can find a single outfit that doesn’t have a sexy twist to it. It would appear that the first question to cross any woman’s mind when searching for a costume is ‘What type of slut should I go as?’ ‘Fess up, ladies – you know it’s true.
Essentially, the feeling of complete liberation that is imparted by fancy dress has gotten to us. The plethora of possibilities that arise from an invite to a costume party send us into such an innate panic that reverting to the tried and tested his ‘n’ hers outfits is the only solution we can think of. So, here’s a challenge: This Halloween, let’s mix it up – let’s dress up for dressing up’s sake and screw this sexy/scary malarkey and wear whatever we damn well want to, not what we’re expected to wear. Hell, let’s all go as magic lizards.
Tags: Ladies Fancy Dress
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 8:27 am and is filed under Fashion Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.