Are you looking for a costume for a summer festival? With more and more festivals encouraging fancy dress to help create a fun atmosphere, we ar elooking forward to a very busy time.

Take Bestival (September 6,7,8 & 9 September). This festival is really into fancy dress and this year’s theme of ‘Wild Things’ gives you lots of interesting costume suggestions including:

• Animals – we have a huge selection of animal overhead masks
• Butterflies
• Bumble Bee & Ladybirds – we have a selection of insect wings & costumes
• Plants & trees
• Wild Weather
• Wild Thing – just turn up looking like a rebel, wearing punk accessories is a good way to go!

In America on this day in 1974 the Universal Product Code (early barcode) was first used. The first item to be scanned was on a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Chewing Gum. The barcode has now become an essential item for many retailers, but there are still some products that cannot be barcoded at present. For example, take our enormous range of costumes for hire. We do have our own method of stock control and although many of our sale items are online, when it comes to our hire costumes, barcoding individual items might be a touch impractical. The simple reason being, that many of the costumes in our fantastic and wide-ranging collection do not just consist of one item. Take something as simple as an Alice in Wonderland outfit, which can comprise five items to make up the costume. First of all, there is the blue dress itself, which is often partially covered by a white Victorian style apron and then there is the blue Alice headband. A suitable wig and socks might also need to be added to complete the look.  A male might want to go to a story book party as Captain Hook or a pirate. In this case, there is the shirt, trousers, coat, belt, hat, wig, hook, sword. This could give you a total of eight items for the basic costume, but then there are also additional accessories you might wish to add, such as a pirate bag (to store your cash, as many costumes do not come with pockets) rings, headbands, earring, eye-patch, pistol, etc.. Some of these accessories we might sell, rather than hire, as they may be difficult or time-consuming to clean, or could easily get lost or mislaid, and the cost of sale is such that it makes sense to do this.