Lesson 11 - Cheap and charming fancy dress

When you hit university, you're definitely going to need some fancy dress. Whether it's for a club night or for a party, fancy dress is inevitable. The key is, I find, to save and re-use everything. Most fancy dress items are multi-purpose. You own a plastic sword? Well, you're a pirate, a robber, a gladiator, a king or whatever else you can muster. Getting a bit creative and working out how you can re-use fancy dress items has been one of my favourite things at uni. Anyway, here's a series of my ramblings on fancy dress and why I love it.

One thing that you 100% need, whether you're a male, female or animal, is a cheap white shirt. The cheap white shirt can act as a basis for pretty much any fancy dress theme. In particular, you need a white shirt for the inevitable School Uniform night. Every club has one and in our Student Union, the Skool Daze LCR is the only fancy dress night where fancy dress is compulsory. You can see why - crack out a white shirt and a tie and you're ready- it doesn't get much simpler than that. Check out my very lovely housemates and I above. Three white shirts, three ties, three "schoolgirls". I've cracked out some retro bunchies as well. What can I say, I'm a maverick. 

Face paint/body paint is also something that you might want to invest in. Face paint can be the only bit of fancy dress you've got on - if there's a Pirate night, an anchor on your cheek with any outfit, and you'll probably get away with it. By the same token, face paint can turn a good fancy dress outfit into an outstanding and uncanny fancy dress outfit.

Group fancy dress is a wicked way of looking immense and knocking everyone else out of the park with your creative skills. One fancy dress outfit looks good, but a group of a few of you on the same theme can be pretty damn immense. As well as this, a fancy dress night is a great way to celebrate someone's birthday. Here's a big group of us, all toga-d up for my housemate James' 20th birthday. It was by far my favourite fancy dress night, and so deliciously simple. We purchased metres and metres of white fabric, everyone got a square of fabric for themselves and we customised it in our own ways. I went mad on the gold accessories, the boys went for leaves around their heads, and you can see some lovely tan leather belts going on. I reckon my whole ensemble, including cheap gold jewellery probably cost £9-£10. Now, a tenner might sound steep for a fancy dress costume, but I wore it all again last night and that lovely bit of white fabric is still very much in tact and ready for my next outing as a Roman/Grecian goddess.


I started this post by saying that you need to re-use items. The easiest way of using this is to go back to your 5 year-old self and have a dressing-up box. I've got a lovely box on top of my wardrobe full of hats, accessories, shirts with holes cut in them, coloured tights - you name it, it's probably in there.

So there you have it. A guide to fancy dress, by someone that loves fancy dress nights perhaps a little bit too much.