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Well-known English actress Asher wrote and published the book back in 1986, but it’s still relevant today. And with a byline like “Over 100 costumes for children and adults and how to make them,” the book’s got our interest piqued to the max.
Personally, I found the Sandwich Man costume to be the best of the best. Even someone as costume-shy as I am is just itching to put that together and try it on. There’s just something deliciously graceful about it, don’t you think?
Asher’s ‘Fancy Dress’ looks like the embodiment of GameStop stocks when they were at their peak. In other words: drops of liquid gold! The book is incredibly expensive on Amazon, switching between ‘unavailable’ to exorbitant prices in the US (we’re talking about hundreds of dollars, sometimes rising to above a thousand for a used copy).
Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the price is far tamer. It’s still expensive, but 60 or 70 pounds is something that a vintage book collector or fancy dress lover wouldn’t balk at paying.
So if you just have to have the book, pray that you can get your hands on a UK version because the US one makes healthcare costs seem paltry in comparison. Or you could trust your luck and expect to find a copy of the book on the curb just like Alina did!
Alina’s thread got over 165.5k likes on Twitter at the time of writing (it’s been climbing steadily since I started writing this article, so expect that number to be getting higher and higher!). The thread also got around 22k retweets (including those fancy quote retweets that Twitter rolled out). And who can blame anyone who’s so excited to see photos from the book? You can bet your bottom dollar that I’ll be fitting in some of these photos whenever the context is right while chatting with my pals online.
As for Alina herself, well, she’s incredibly talented. The Moscow-born woman is currently living in Philadelphia. She’s a poet and an editor by trade. Her collection of poems, ‘What Urge Will Save Us,’ got published by Spooky Girlfriend Press in 2017, according to her website. So she’s a professional in her field.
What’s more, Alina got the Leeway Foundation’s 2020 Art & Change grant. She also hosts poetry workshops, events, and panels for a variety of organizations, from Rutgers University to the Institute of Contemporary Art.
If that wasn’t enough, Alina is also the founding member of the Cheburashka Collective (loving that name!) which is a group of “women & nonbinary writers who are emigres/first-gen/refugees from the Soviet diaspora.” But even while she’s editing literary magazines and coordinating festivals, she also finds the time for her day job in higher education communications. Do we wish that we all had the amount of energy that Alina has? I’ll say!
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So, dear Pandas, what did you think of the ‘Fancy Dress’ photos? Which costume did you like the most? Which one did you think was the wackiest, weirdest, and worth making? Did you get any ideas for Halloween, however far away that might be? Maybe you’ve even got a copy of Asher’s ‘Fancy Dress’ at home? Let us know what you think in the comment section below. We can’t wait to hear from you!