A History of Fancy Dress - from Masquerade Balls to Morphsuits

Aug 8
17:01

2012

Jude Ellery

Jude Ellery

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A short history of fancy dress parties - from Venetian masquerade balls to retro 80s parties, and from bonfires & human sacrifices to Freddy Krueger outfits.

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You’re browsing the net for a cheap fancy dress costume.  You find a hilarious range of morph suits or pirate outfits that’ll really make your mates stand out in a crowd. Click,A History of Fancy Dress - from Masquerade Balls to Morphsuits Articles click, click, and it’s ordered.  But have you ever stopped to wonder when this peculiar custom originated?  Why do we attend parties dressed as… well, someone else?

Like most Western habits, religion played a key roll in the making of the modern day fancy dress party.  It all began with Lent.  These forty days and forty nights are a reminder of Jesus’ time spend in the wilderness.  Traditionally, no parties or celebrations are held during this time, and people refrain from eating rich foods, such as meat, dairy, fats – and these days, chocolate.

So, in the days leading up to Lent, all such products had to be disposed of.  What better way to do so than organising a giant party, where the whole community could come together and gorge themselves silly?  And so, we had the Carnival.

Some carnival-style celebrations do pre-date Christian times, like the ancient Roman festivals of Saturnalia and Bacchanalia.  These were most likely absorbed into the Italian masquerade ball though, resulting in the world-famous Carnival of Venice, starting forty days before Easter and ending on Shrove Tuesday (known locally as Fat Tuesday, or “Martedì Grasso”).  It was here that the wearing of masks began, with Venetian maskmakers (“mascheran”) enjoying a special place in society, with their own laws and guilds.

Unfortunately, there is no concrete proof as to why mask-wearing caught on, but it is thought to be a reaction to the extremely strict class-structures in Venetian society.  Wearing a mask allowed people to be treated equally, and they were permitted to do so between the festival of Santo Stefano (26 December) and Shrove Tuesday, and again between 5 October and Christmas.  Thus, citizens were allowed to spend a large chunk of the year in disguise.

Masked balls and such like were a feature of many Shakespeare plays, often with tragic consequences.  Aphra Behn’s “The Rover” followed a similar theme, the play set during the Carnival of Venice where characters could hide their identities and thus free themselves from inhibitions.  These kinds of masked celebrations grew in popularity throughout Europe between the 15th and 18th centuries, with masquerade balls being a sort of game where guests would try to guess who each other were.

Though the fall of the Venetian republic saw the use of traditional masks decline and eventually disappear, the groundwork had already been done for the costume party.  In Victorian times people begun to wear costumes at parties again, and the Edwardians continued the revival.  In the early part of the 20th century these were simple affairs, with costumes either hired or home made.  Unsurprisingly, things got a little more extravagant in the 1970s, and then in the 1990s, cheap Asian imports allowed the industry to grow at a staggering rate.

Nowadays, retro themes like 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s costumes are popular, including dressing as icons from these periods, like Elvis Presley, Madonna and John Lennon.  It is common for a birthday party dress code to reflect the decade of the person’s birth.  Hen and Stag parties dress as ironic/taboo themes like Vicars and Nuns, and even more recently “Book Week” sees children turn up to school as weird and wonderful Roald Dahl creations, among others.

Still, all of these themes pale in comparison to the Halloween Fancy Dress Party, which has slightly different origins – though again, religion was of course the driving factor. 

Centuries ago, the Celts would dress in ghoulish costumes to scare evil spirits.  The festival of Samhain (meaning summer’s end, but falling on the last day of Autumn) was a time for stock-taking and preparation for the cold months ahead.  There was a feeling that this was the time of the year when the physical and supernatural worlds were closest, and to ward off the spirits huge bonfires were built.  The help of the gods was invoked through animal – and sometimes even human – sacrifice.

In Christian times this tradition evolved into All Saint’s Day (also called All Hallows) and All Soul’s Day, falling on 1 and 2 November respectively.  This was a time for honouring saints and praying for the recently deceased who had not yet reached heaven.  Because it was believed that the souls of the dead wandered the earth until these days, masks and costumes were worn to avoid being recognised by a soul seeking vengeance on their enemies. 

Trick-or-treating began in the Middle Ages, and nowadays still resembles the medieval custom of “souling”, where poor folk would go door to door, offering prayers for the dead in return for food.  This originated in Britain andIreland, though it travelled as far south as Italy, again featuring in a Shakespeare play, The Two Gentleman of Verona.

In Scotland and Ireland, “guising” – children disguising themselves then going door to door – was first recorded in 1895.  They carried lanterns made from scooped out turnips, and were rewarded with cakes, fruit and money.  The first recorded instance in North America comes shortly afterwards in 1911, when an Ontario newspaper reported children guising around the neighbourhood.Traditional games are still played at Halloween: apple bobbing sees participants use only their teeth to remove apples from a basin, while another favourite includes eating syrup or treacle-coated scones or toffee apples, dangled on strings, which inevitably results in a sticky face.  Some games are apparently forms of divination, such as one where an apple is carved in one long strip then tossed over the shoulder, with the peel supposedly spelling out the first letter of the participant’s future spouse.  In the 1900s a game involved walnut shells.  Fortunes were written on paper with milk, and when dry they were places in walnut shells.  When warmed, the milk would turn brown and the “fortune” would appear on supposedly blank paper.Like Valentines Day and even Christmas, today Halloween has become a massively commercial event, with few properly aware of the real origins behind the event.  At first, costumes were focused on traditional supernatural figures: monsters, ghosts, skeletons, witches and devils.  Nowadays anything scary suffices, with popular characters from fiction like Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers seen every year on 31 October.