Belle from Beauty and the Beast and the ghosts of costumes past

let me tell you about my binbag era

I am not a halloween girl. I am not even an autumn girl. so, when the day of a halloween party I was invited to rolled around, I had given no regard whatsoever to the thought of dressing up and had to cobble together some semblance of a halloween costume in the couple of hours before the party. I was so stuck for ideas that at one point I was googling ‘brown hair women’ and, latterly, ‘blonde hair women’ after remembering I had a blonde wig up the loft from a previous G(a)linda the good witch costume. this would have been a much more timely year for a Wicked costume, but unfortunately my Elphaba is in The Hague. not for war crimes. she just lives there.

eventually, I settled on Belle from Beauty and the Beast (brown hair woman). I had a soft white collared shirt in my wardrobe and managed to make a poor man’s imitation of her blue over-dress thing after much frustration and something resembling fabric origami using a men’s work shirt I scavenged from the deep dark depths of the ironing basket. alas, no hair ribbon, but I did draw on my eyebrows for the second time in my life. the first was years ago, for a ‘fairytale’ themed sittning (Swedish dinner party) to which I went as the Wicked Witch from Snow White (Hag Version). I drew moles and wrinkles on my face and dark circles under my eyes with an eyeshadow pencil and doused my hair in talcum powder in an attempt to make it white which wasn’t at all successful—yet whenever I use dry shampoo it looks like I have grey roots why??—and wore a binbag as a cloak.

that was, I hate to say it, truly my binbag era. over the course of that year, I made 13 costumes out of binbags. most notably Edna Mode from The Incredibles (hero legend icon) for Halloween. I had to make the binbag dress twice because I accidentally superglued the sleeve (made of binbag diamonds superglued together) of the first to the carpet and, after the rescue-rip, it had begun to look rather limp and lacklustre.

I wore it with this wig which ignited a desire to cut myself a fringe that I am still suppressing to this day.

that wig was reused when I recreated Sia’s Chandelier music video a few years later. for work. I did that for work. in these pictures I am at work. there’s a whole video. honestly, i’m not even being sarcastic when I say you’d be shocked by how decent it is.

i’m doing the splits here. doubt i’d be able to do that now.

another notable binbag outing was for a ‘Harry Potter dinner’ when I was working as a camp counsellor at an American summer camp. I went as Professor McGonagall (❤️), by which I mean I tied a binbag around my shoulders, picked a stick up off the ground and just had a Scottish accent.

my favourite (and by ‘my favourite’ I do mean ‘the worst’) of all my binbag efforts also happened to be Harry Potter themed and also happened to be at camp america. I had the excellent, phenomenal, ingenious idea to just stick a big binbag over me (setting a great example for the children) and call myself a dementor. but when I went hunting through the store cupboards I couldn’t find any of the big giant human-sized bin bags that I knew we had and could only find these wee tiny binbags that I had never seen before. but this was about 2 minutes before the costume was required so I put it on anyway. the binbag only came down to about chest level and was quite narrow. so my ‘dementor’ was running about in a t-shirt and shorts with a black plastic bag over its head. I definitely looked more like i’d escaped from a hostage situation than like i’d been let loose from Azkaban.

back to my Belle costume. I wore a pair of black ballet flats I bought in Walmart for an end of summer camp staff party back in my binbag era. for years i’ve thought Walmart shoes are really small-made, but I just googled it and turns out a US size 4 is a UK size 2 (not, as I had previously assumed, a 4) so no wonder they’ve always been extremely unpleasant to wear. that and the fact that you can feel every individual blade of grass through the soles. so I added a bit of a Cinderella’s ugly step sister vibe to the Belle costume.

I obviously had to take a book as a prop, but as I am a kindle reader (sometimes. mostly I read on my laptop. I know. I know, okay!!!), my options were limited. I ended up taking Bridget Jones’s Diary, which I don’t think Belle would read (she’s much more a high fantasy girl). but my other options could essentially be boiled down to: my childhood copy of Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree (too precious), Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil (extremely not the vibe) and Mason and McCall Smith’s Law and Medical Ethics Tenth Edition (approximately the size of my torso and the weight of a medium-sized cat).

here’s a picture taken at the party (I cropped it) — maybe my hair/makeup isn’t a million miles away from the reference photo??? not bad for a last minute job if I do say so myself. despite my looking at the person I was talking to instead of at the camera, I am not not pleased with the similarities here…

unfortunately I had not darkened my undereyes with eyeshadow here :o

once I committed to those eyebrows, I was committed to those eyebrows. I know my hair’s a riot. unfortunately my hair is made of hair and not made of cartoon.

it was only when I was on the street outside the party location, and far too late to change, that I considered that there might be something a bit so you think you look like a Disney princess? about my costume decision. but c’est la vie. and thankfully everyone knew who I was meant to be. my makeshift outer layer even stayed together surprisingly well for most of the night, only falling apart at about 1am when I executed my party trick, i.e. when I did the worm across the living room floor. there’s something particularly unprincesslike about drunkenly picking yourself up off the floor and leaving a layer behind to the soundtrack of Men at Work’s Down Under.

anyway, fuck halloween. chuck a plastic baby into a crib and get the Shakin’ Stevens on. i have mince pies in the cupboard already. Merry Christmas Everyone.