Jane Asher's Fancy Dress: The 1983 Costume Book Full of 80s Actors in Homemade Chaos
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Somewhere in a lot of British lofts and charity shops, there's a battered hardback called Jane Asher's Fancy Dress. Flip past the introduction and you'll find grown adults, several of them recognisable working actors, standing in front of a plain studio backdrop dressed as a rock salmon, a jailbird and a pixie on a toadstool. It's not a spoof. It's a genuine 1983 how to guide, and it's one of the strangest artefacts British publishing produced that decade.
The book was published by Pelham Books under the full title Jane Asher's Fancy Dress: Over 100 Costumes for Children and Adults and How to Make Them. It ran to 144 pages and promised exactly what it said: patterns and instructions for building costumes out of stuff you already had lying around the house, from cardboard and umbrellas to bubble wrap and toilet rolls.
Who was Jane Asher, and why was she writing this?
By 1983, Jane Asher had already lived several careers. She'd been a working child actress since the age of five, she'd spent the mid 1960s as one of the most photographed women in Britain during her engagement to Paul McCartney, and by the time this book came out she'd been married for two years to the cartoonist and illustrator Gerald Scarfe, best known for his work on Pink Floyd's The Wall.
Asher wasn't a costume designer by trade. She built a second, entirely separate public identity in the 1980s and 90s as a domestic craft author, first with cake decorating books that turned into an actual cake supply business, and then with titles like this one on costumes and party planning. Fancy Dress sits right at the start of that pivot, and it's the one people still find and post about decades later, mostly because of who's in it.
The cast of characters modelling the costumes
Rather than hire anonymous models, Asher recruited actors and friends from the industry to pose in the finished costumes, with photography by Bryan Wharton. The results have aged into something between a fashion plate and a fever dream. Donald Pleasence, a few years after his run as Dr. Loomis in Halloween, appears as a judge in a wig made from toilet roll. Terry Jones of Monty Python turns up too, along with Likely Lads star Rodney Bewes. Joanna Lumley, a couple of years before she became a household name as Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous, models the Knickerbocker Glory costume, a sundae themed outfit that Asher's captions credit her with pulling off despite the material being little more than bubble wrap and foil. Actress Joanna David, married to Edward Fox, is styled as a fountain made from strips of polythene packing material, and Edward Fox himself appears elsewhere in the book alongside his young daughter Emilia Fox, decades before she became known for her own acting career. None of them look remotely self-conscious about it, which is a big part of the book's charm.
There's a small, unintentional joke buried in the casting. One of the costumes in the book is listed as the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, a nod to the infamous 1973 public information film about drowning that terrified a generation of British schoolchildren. That film's ghostly narrator was voiced by Donald Pleasence, the same actor who shows up elsewhere in this book dressed as a toilet paper judge. Whether Asher clocked the coincidence when she cast him isn't recorded anywhere, but it's the kind of detail that makes secondhand copies of this book worth digging through.
Craft instructions built for real materials, not a costume shop
The instructions themselves are notably low tech for a book with this much star power attached. Costumes are built from lampshades, broken umbrellas, carrier bags, cardboard tubes and bubble wrap rather than anything you'd have to buy specially. The write ups lean conceptual rather than step by step, which reviewers over the years have noted makes the book more useful to someone who already sews or crafts a bit than to a total beginner. It uses British terminology and metric measurements throughout, and it was written for parents putting together a costume the night before a school do, not professional costumers.
The costume list ranges from the straightforward, a princess, a dragon, a Victorian, to the properly strange, including a walking dictionary entry and a knickerbocker glory sundae. There's a real range across historical figures too, with looks built around ancient Greece, the medieval period, Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I sitting alongside more contemporary ideas like a punk and a vision of the future.
Why it's still being passed around online
Fancy Dress never had the commercial life of Asher's cake books, but it's had a strange afterlife as an internet curiosity. A charity shop copy found its way onto Twitter a few years back after one user photographed the highlights and posted them in a thread that pulled in well over 100,000 likes, introducing the book to an entirely new audience who'd never have come across a 1980s British costume manual otherwise. Bloggers who pick up their own secondhand copies tend to photograph the same handful of pages, the toilet roll judge, the lampshade robot, the actors clearly having a laugh with people they knew from work, and those images keep recirculating on social media as a slice of pre-digital British silliness. Archive.org holds scanned copies of the book under both its UK title, Jane Asher's Fancy Dress, and the US edition, Jane Asher's Costume Book, for anyone who wants to see the whole thing rather than the highlight reel.
The book's acknowledgements page credits Asher's husband, Gerald Scarfe, with helping dream up costume ideas, and her mother with keeping track of which outfits were finished and ready for photography. That family involvement seems to have stuck. Decades later, Asher has still been known to throw costume parties tied to her design work, with Scarfe and other actor friends dressing up right alongside her, proof that the spirit of the original book never really went away.
It's a small, odd footnote in a very long and varied career, but it's a good reminder that Asher was building a media brand well outside acting long before that became a standard move for actors. Forty years on, it's still the toilet roll wig that people remember.
