Episodes
Bonus Episode: Sweating It Out – Reflections on the Christmas Sweater
Fancy dress may be inherently unfashionable but it has found a home in the seasonal wardrobe of many people the world over – the …
Episode 11: Once more into the Breaches – Fancy Dress and Re-Enactment
This week’s episode raises a potentially divisive question: is re-enactment a form of fancy dress? From historical associations a…
Episode 10: Dressing the Part – the influence of literature on fancy …
Dressing the Part – the influence of literature on fancy dress. Episode 8 looked at how fancy dress shapes fictional stories, usu…
Episode 9: Fashion Turns Ugly? – When Costume Meets Catwalk
It is not contentious to connect costume and the catwalk: Alexander McQueen did in 1997 with his ‘It’s A Jungle Out There’ collec…
Episode 8: The Book was Better: The Realities of Fancy Dress in Ficti…
Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, novelists seemed fascinated by fancy dress. From Defoe to de Maurier, Blyton to P…
Halloween Bonus Episode
Halloween Headlines – The fancy dress day of the year, Halloween provides an opportunity for people the world over to get creativ…
Episode 7: Winter is Coming – Romanovs, Unrest and the Costume Ball o…
On 11 and 13 February 1903, the Winter Palace, St Petersburg, was the venue for one of the most opulent costumed entertainments h…
Episode 6: Terror, Trauma, Tantrums: Reflections on Halloween Past an…
For Heidi Klum, and many more people besides, Halloween is ‘the’ fancy dress event of the year. Since the 1950s, the opportunity …
Episode 5: The Hero Inside Yourself – Fantasy Costumes and Film
Like fancy dress, movies are adept at conveying the zeitgeist. And just like fancy dress, the Silver Screen can reassure us, moti…
Episode 4: Warriors and Wigs – Fancy Dress in Wartime
Today Lucy and Benjamin analyse how people’s social, political and gendered roles are disrupted by war. Fancy dress costume, whic…
Episode 3: Nazis, Pirates, Tarts – Fancy Dress in Bad Taste
Join Lucy Clayton and Dr Benjamin Wild for another eye-opening episode, as they explore a British phenomenon in popular culture, …
Episode 2: Barbaric Splendour – The Devonshire House Ball, 1897
In the second episode of a new series that explores the prevalence, potency and politics of fancy dress costume, Lucy Clayton and…
Episode 1: Who’s Laughing Now? - Fancy Dress in Protest
In the first of a new series that looks at the social significance and psychology of dressing up, Lucy Clayton and cultural histo…