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Dress: Fancy: The Podcast About Dressing Up

Nov 29, 2018

Dressing the Part – the influence of literature on fancy dress. Episode 8 looked at how fancy dress shapes fictional stories, usually for the worse. This week’s show considers the fictional stories that shape fancy dress in real-life. From Alice lost her in Wonderland, to Hamlet lost in his mental anguish, via...


Nov 22, 2018

It is not contentious to connect costume and the catwalk: Alexander McQueen did in 1997 with his ‘It’s A Jungle Out There’ collection. However, few designers and fashion houses are as willing – or as brave? – to compare their collections with the dressing up box. In today’s fashion industry ‘Fancy Dress’...


Nov 15, 2018

Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, novelists seemed fascinated by fancy dress. From Defoe to de Maurier, Blyton to Poe, authors used costumed entertainments to drive narratives and to determine the fate of their lead characters. Always exhilarating, very often devastating, the place of fancy dress in...


Nov 8, 2018

Halloween Headlines – The fancy dress day of the year, Halloween provides an opportunity for people the world over to get creative with glue guns, sequins and, if you’re Heidi Klum, latex and fluorescent green make-up. From A-listers to Z-listers, Disney to divas, the very best to the shocking worst, Lucy and Ben...


Nov 1, 2018

On 11 and 13 February 1903, the Winter Palace, St Petersburg, was the venue for one of the most opulent costumed entertainments hosted by a Russian Tsar. It was also to be the last. In reviving the spectacle of the Romanov’s gilded past, Nicholas II, his family and court, demonstrated the untenable gulf that existed...