Today’s costume theme gives lots of choices for your guests. Whether they decide to wear ‘normal’ clothing but in contrasting colours, or they go the ‘whole hog’ and dress up in a multi coloured costume is really up to them.
It’s a great theme for party decorations as you can use all odds and ends to create a vision of colour in your function room
Clowns make a great costume choice as do 80s outfits with all it’s neon colours, but really any costume will suffice, as long as it is multi coloured.
Last week we mentioned the start of the new financial tax year, tax being one way of earning the State extra income. Some taxes are compulsory and apply to all (eg VAT), others are voluntary – you don’t have to drink and smoke but there’s tax if you choose to do so. Although there are some tax aspects to clothing (such as no VAT on children’s wear), there was a time when there were actually laws as to what you could wear: Clothing defined status and it was important that no-one dressed ‘above their station’ so ‘sumptuary laws’ of medieval and Tudor times defined the rules and imposed fines and punishments (such as a period in the stocks) if you got it wrong. Some of the measures were designed to help protect against foreign imports, but mostly they were there to keep people in their place and earn the State money. Now there’s an idea which could prevent a few frocky horror crimes against fashion nowadays!
You may think that choosing a colour as a fancy dress theme is a bit limiting, but you will surprised at how many costumes are available in red and this will give you and your guests some great red costume choices
With one week to go until Christmas, we recently red –sorry- read about a famous architect who puts his success down to the wearing of his ‘lucky’ colour – red. He dresses head to toe in red clothing and uses only red pens, drives a red car, you get the picture. Given that the most famous figure of the forthcoming season has red (with some white trimmings) as his keynote colour, aside from its associations with warmth and other aspects of Christmas, what is the power of red? Apparently it’s a colour that commands respect – the Church has its cardinals in red – and Saint Nicholas (continental counterpart to Father Christmas and Santa Claus) and patron saint of Children, wears red archbishop-style robes in deference to his religious origins in Turkey (the country, not the seasonal bird). On the flipside of course, red is also associated with the Devil, daring and flamboyance. It may not be a colour everyone can carry off but it certainly gets you noticed. Of course not all Father Christmas’ choose red – we’ve heard of a few in green, and it is said that ex-prime Minister John Major had an outfit made in blue – but whatever your shade of choice we can certainly offer you a colourful Christmas here at Props & Frocks.
Just some red costume ideas we have, but really your choices are endless…
Saloon Girl
Father Christmas
Miss Xmas
Scarlett O’Hara
Spanish lady – red is a very popular colour for a Spanish costume
Devils
Thriller – Michael Jackson’s iconic costume
Ladybug
Cardinal
Also, why not wear one of our fantastic red fancy dress wigs, or what about a glamorous masquerade eyemask? And, if you really don’t fancy dressing up, why not just wear red clothing?
Today’s costume theme is Black & White as on this day in 1840 the Penny Black started its role as the world’s first postage stamp. A British invention (which is why Britain doesn’t have its name on its stamps) the Penny Black had gone on sale a few days earlier in preparation for this novel concept of prepayment – up until then people had paid to receive their letters!
From the costuming point of view, we couldn’t see much mileage in a Stamp-based theme, which goes to show that philately gets you nowhere, but there is a splendid opportunity to mark the occasion with a Black & White party. Not only can we offer a vast selection of costumes on a black and/or white theme but we also have a vast array of support decorations, Venetian style feather masks and accessories.
The black and white theme is very popular as it looks very elegant. You must be clear on your invite if you expect your guests to dress up in costume, or if just black clothing is acceptable. It’s a great excuse for the men to wear a dinner suit and look very dashing! You could give some suggestions on your invite, to avoid confusion. Have a look at our other blogs on a black & white colour theme
Some Black & White costume / accessory options:
Black or White wigs – look at our Cruella wig – it would be ideal for this event
Boas – add a bit of glamour to a plain black or white dress
Eyemasks – we stock a large range of black, white & black & white styles
Props n Frocks stocks a huge range of costumes that come in black or white. It would be difficult to list them all on this blog. We would suggest you put the key words black white in the search box (find top right under the lady with the blue wig) and see what comes up. If you are local, we invite you to pop into our fancy dress shop and browse the huge selection of costumes that we have to hire or buy.
It’s not often we get to have an excuse for a colour-based fancy dress party theme (although there are two ‘Orange’-orientated events later this week) but today the opportunity presents itself because it was on 10th February 1996 that Big Blue triumphed in a match against a world chess champion. Big Blue was actually an IBM supercomputer (a successor to a machine called Deep Thought), the champion was Gary Kasparov and admittedly although the colour link is a little tenuous, we thought we should seize the opportunity to suggest a colour party, which, of course, can cover a whole spectrum of costumes (some of which could be worn with shades!)
You may want to limit the colour range to just a couple to get some sort of consistency, but that is really down to you.
Some costumes ideas for colours are below…
Purple – Deep Purple, Prince
Red – Christmas Costumes, Scarlett O’Hara, Ladybird Costumes
contrasting colours, or they go the ‘whole hog’ and dress up in a multi coloured costume is really up to them.
