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!