Why Does This ’80s Guide To Fancy Dress Feel So Relevant Right Now?

Jane Asher herself, quarantining in the UK with her family, heard about her new Twitter fame from her daughter-in-law and from staff at the National Autistic Society, of which she is president. “It’s a very jolly thing to be going viral,” she says, cheerfully. Asher started her career as an actress, and her inspiration for the book came, in part, from her time wearing theatre costumes – “of making things look good, from the outside”.

Asher can rationalise the book’s current appeal, partly due to growing eco-consciousness – to a contemporary reader, the book is oddly on the pulse with a political message of recycle, reuse and save. And partly due to rose-tinted glasses. “For young people tweeting about it today, it’s just so far back. When I was that age, it would have been like coming across something from the 1920s,” she says. “They probably think life was just so wonderful,” she laughs.

“I hope we have a moment of flagrant unbridled joy and pleasure,” says Alina Pleskova, who stumbled across the book, of life after Covid.In the book’s introduction, Asher writes about the history of costume parties, and the way they have intersected with efforts to achieve freedom and relief. “One of the attractions seems to have been the change of character and relaxing of morals that was possible once a disguise was assumed,” she writes of the European masked balls of the 17century.

Back in 1983, one of Asher’s costume designs looked ahead. “The Future” , requires silver foil, plastic beakers, bubble wrap and plenty of wire to create a look that nods to the robotic, the spacey. “No doubt micro computers in the home will be programmed to do almost anything we want,” she wrote. If she was designing such a costume now, what would she fashion? “If I was feeling depressed I think I might design a costume made entirely out of Amazon cardboard boxes,” she says.

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