I should have behaved.
I dinn't think going to a fancy dress party as a dominatrix was such a big deal. Funny thing was...it was only the girls who didn't like it. I didn't care any way as it was a good idea to start buying a nice assortment of bits n bobs.
(Oops....did I say that out loud cos I really bloody want to., Tue 29 Aug 2006, 18:26, Reply)

Errors
I was an indie boy in my teens. Mostly this manifested itself in fairly harmless ways (brown corduroy suit anyone? Mmmm, looked so good with my blue satin shirt) but around 1996 things took a turn for the worse, because at this point I discovered Placebo.

Not too long afterwards I was seen out wearing Caterpillar boots, skin tight PVC cow-patterned trousers and a midriff-baring skinny-fit T-shirt. In Slough, of all places. I'm amazed I survived.

Thankfully those days are behind me now, although I have recently learned that you should never get drunk before programming your scrolling LED T-shirt panel, especially not if you're in the pub with "friends", as this leads to the message "can i spaff on your norks?" flashing across your chest all evening. And no-one will be impressed.
(wellgroomedwookiee is a filthy-minded hobgoblin, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 17:55, Reply)

Goths of the World Unite!
...you have nothing to lose but your dignity.

'k - moment of confession, peeps. I went to a certain highly regarded university with hundreds of years of tradition.

So, despite my solidly working-class roots, I find myself in this place surrounded by over-privileged twunts with platignum credit cards, overbites, and mostly called Jocasta and Tarquin. But as if that wasn't bad enough, it turned out that you had to wear a uniform for exams.

Yes, a fucking uniform. Stressed about exams? Worried about grades? No worries - we'll make you doll up in a bastard monkey suit before you can even get in the door. And what's more, we'll use a latin name for it. Ladies and Gentlefolk, I give you... Sub Fusc.

And what a stupid getup it was. Black suit. (extra comfy, and in no way cheap). White shirt, dark socks and shoes (and yes, I did see them checking), a gown (pointless pointless pointless - and the 'smarter' you were, the bigger the gown got - yet another way of advertising how your wonderful fee-paying parents thrust you through a public exam factory like the braying, over-funded spunkmuppet you are), and just to top it off; a white bow tie. WHITE. And a mortar board - which you had to carry. Oh no, no wearing it.

For the love of cock.

Anyways, it became the game of choice to subvert this in any way you could. Props to a mate who wore a suit with sequins sewn in, who turned the entire exam hall into a disco when he put up his hand for extra paper - and a challenge for me to beat. And how, gentle reader, did I think I would subvert the system, cast two fingers at authority and generally fuck with the man? Yes... like many others here, through the medium of Goth.

So, come the final final, and I don my armour: black ten hole docs; check. Aids awareness ribbon or similar bodily adornment which they just couldn't ban; check. Nail varnish, black; check. Hair, slicked back ala Dave Vanian; check. Eyeliner, purple; check. Earings/rings/amulets; check to the max.

And out the door I march, into the hall, feeling a million dollars and ten-foot tall (hell, docs do a lot for yer height, guys)... only to hear a sniggering wench, probably called Tamsin, say to her friend:

'look at that idiot. I bet he's borrowed that suit from his father. I can't believe they let people like THAT in these days'.

At which point, centuries of social conditioning kicked in, and I had a small cry, knowing that no matter how I looked, how strong I felt, those bastard toffs would always win.

That, and I was having a bad reaction to the eyeliner. Red-eyed, swollen lidded and weeping, I could barely see the exam paper... so, what was the single greatest thing I learnt after three years at Uni?

Goths look miserable because their eye-makeup hurts.

Word t'your maternal parent.

Grouch.
( Grouch would quite like his clients to stop being numptys, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 17:26, Reply)

I am so sorry...
sunday night i split ma right toe nail in half n so had to go get it all bandaged up. Monday mornin i went out but cos i couldnt wear shoes i had to wear flip flops and cos the bandages had to be taken care of i wore a sock on ma right foot, walked around town lookin like a numpty but mildly pain free. Today was walkin bak in town same jumble of one foot socked n flip flops n wha did i see? FOUR other people wearing the same ting, being a bit confused as to how many people could possibly injure their right toe i asked n they jus said oh we thought u looked cool yday!! Bloody numptys
I am so sorry i think i may have jus started the worst fasion ting eva......ima so so so sorry
(Fluent In Bentish Living in Scatman's World, tis being fun!, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 15:39, Reply)

Unusual and slightly sad...
My friend was having a fancy-dress competition at the local Pizza Hut when I was about 6 or 7. My mum thought it would be a good idea to dress me up like an Oxo Cube (!?!?). I had to walk down the high street wearing a foil-covered box with big red 'oxo's on it while people pointed and laughed. Needless to say I didn't win, a girl dressed as Charlie Chaplin did.
(spammygirly, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 12:48, Reply)

ripped jeans
as a teen metal mother, everything was ripped to shreds before being worthy of wearing. I was at home, having been off school ill for a couple of days, and was getting into the spirit of taking it easy by wearing one spectacularly destroyed pair of jeans. A couple of female friends came round to make sure I was ok, and we sat in my room on beanbags and shot the shit for a bit. Until of course one of them stops in mid conversation, and stares at me crotch. Turns out the boys had popped out of the barracks for a quick roam, and were now fully on display for the world (well, two 15 year old girls). I may have been a little over enthusiastic with the stanlley knife. Shame, cos I really fancied one of them, and it totally destroyed my chances with her at the time. Still copped off with her about 10 years later. Actually, Im writing this and I just remembered that I tapped off with her at a party about 2 years later, but had to stop before fully consumating the relationship because she had to empty some alcohol out of her decidedly small frame. Via her sweet little mouth.
God bless ballet dancers; great legs, and not scared of throwing up either!
(kaptinkurtz, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 12:27, Reply)

DIY Fashion
When I was 7 or 8 went to a Hallowe'en party as a mummy. My mum just used a roll of toilet paper wound around my body, sadly 10 mins after I got there it all started unravelling. By the time I was collected at the end of the party I was shivering in the scout hall in my vest and pants.
(monkeyitis, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 11:32, Reply)

The Cat
When I was young I had a slight obsession with The Cat from Red Dwarf, thinking it would be really cool if I looked just like him I went out especially to purchase a shiny shirt, some black trousers and hundreds of sequins to attach.

Luckily my dad intervened and explained to me exactly why people didn’t walk around dressed like The Cat.

“Son” he said “You will look like a tit!”

Point taken, thanks Dad!
(Minty Hit, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 10:58, Reply)

Apeloverage...
I nearly choked on my coffee giggling at that.

You bad bad man - with excellent taste.
( Bats, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 10:19, Reply)

not so much a fashion disaster
As something really cool, but only to people who are themselves fashion disasters.


(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 10:03, Reply)

DIY of sorts
Skintight jeans with a suit jacket. It was 1982 and it still wasnt fashionable. For some reason I felt more comfortable in them as opposed to the matching suit trousers that should've completed the ensemble.
IIRC I also rolled the sleeves of the jacket up, some 4 years before Don Johnson did it in Miami Vice!
(LunarJim, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 8:01, Reply)

Bagheera
I wanted to go to the school Halloween party with my fellow ten-year-olds as Bagheera, the black panther, from the Jungle Book stories, but I couldn't get my parents to help with the costume. So, I cut up lots of brown-paper grocery bags, colored them an oily-black with some crayons, stapled them together over my body, and went.

At the party, some big ox of a dad could not stop pointing and laughing. The wound still hurts.
(Perv With A Dog had his eyes pecked out by scrub jays on, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 4:16, Reply)

imagine...
imagine getting your mum to spend at least three nights running making you the most awesome white power ranger suit ever invented by the whole of mankind. Complete with boot things to go over your shoes, and erm... gold bits.

you are coolest cat in town.
you look the fucking shit.
OF COURSE you wear it to the school disco.
in the car you're excited... people are gona worship you for this stroke of genius.

until you realise no-one else is wearing fancy dress... and your wearing a fucking power rangers constume.


i *was* 10 at the time... so excusable.
(quibble, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 2:47, Reply)

Elastic + Underwear
I was 14, it was red nose day in the UK..

This years theme was underwear or PANTS to us brits.

I thought it was cool to get some pants and attach elastic to them. I thought it looked awesome. Of course I didn't notice the brown stain.. even through the day at school..

Always wodnered why those people giggled.
(RobbJ, Tue 29 Aug 2006, 0:43, Reply)

7 years old...
My Tom and Jerry t-shirt. Khaki shorts. Beige baseball cap (on backwards, of course). White knee socks. Black, clumpy school shoes.

Plastic.
Yellow.
Sunglasses.

I thought I was the shit.
Why are kids so fucking weird?
( Spazzcat jam out with your clam out, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 23:38, Reply)

My mum threw this out
When I was about 15 I stapled together a black t-shirt and a white t-shirt (with the white on the outside).

I cut out bullet holes on the front and a huge gaping exit wound on the back and liberally coated the holes with red fabric paint.

Did I stop there?

No, I wrote on it in big black letters "SUPPORT MENTAL HEALTH: KILL THE SANE"

My mum found it and threw it out (at least that's what I presumed happened - it was never seen again anyway).

I'm fine now.
(Wascally Weasel now with 100% fewer jokes., Mon 28 Aug 2006, 19:15, Reply)

odd shoes
for a while as a teenager (in the late 80's early 90's) I thought it was cool to wear odd shoes, one red, one black. The funny thing is that no-one seemed to bat an eye-lid
(negative armadillo There never was much hope..just a fool's hope., Mon 28 Aug 2006, 19:11, Reply)

hallowe'en
hallowe'en 2005:

Red velvet dress, with glow in the dark bats sewn to the bottom, and a few stars. I loved it, but felt like a pratt since it was the friday before hallowe'en and i was also the only one dressed up.

hallowe'en 2004

Long black dress, shortened to a short black dress with ragged edges, and i wore a tiara and smudged eyeliner to give a "dead prom queen" look, which then ended up looking like the cover of "celebrity skin" by hole. by the third night club the straps had broken and i was left clutching at my breasts as i walked to get a taxi home.

hallowe'en 2003

Black strappy top, black shawl, black trousers.
and mini tesco cereal boxes stuck on with double sided sticky tape, with knives and bombs attacking them, and with faces of pain on the boxes. "cereal killer" is a stupid costume, and by the time i got to the club, everything had fallen off.pfft.
(rainmaker is 98% lurker., Mon 28 Aug 2006, 18:54, Reply)

mmmm, wooly jumpers...
...that are intended for three year olds.
my friends mum had been reluctant to throw one of her old jumpers out because it was knitted by her great aunt (i think?). so, being the 13 year old that i was, i decided to try it on.

bit tight round the boobs as i remember, but it fit. :D

her mum wasnt too pleased though..
(reisu has a man on a ladder fetish, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 18:28, Reply)

Lenient parents*
This isn't really a disaster, since she was only 2 and thought she looked great...

I trod up the stairs at my daughter's crap daycare center (the manager got caught doing identity theft and embezelling a few years later) and came upon a vision of lovliness: Emily had on a clown suit, plastic Sponge-Bob sunglasses, bunny slippers forced into a pair of baby-Birkenstock sandals and a big shit-eating grin.

I said, "Hey, honey, did you dress yourself this morning?"

She nodded, proud of her accomplishment.

* it sounds like I disapprove-I don't. Fighting with children over what they'll wear is a stupid waste of time. I've let my kid walk to school in a foot of snow without a coat when he insists he's not cold. He freezes his ass off and doesn't argue with me the next time. Simple.
(TDub Nunc id vides, nunc ne vides on, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 18:14, Reply)

white gloss paint plus old suit jacket...
Thought it would be a "cool" "urban" idea to get a friend to write

i love you
-
when you're not
-
masterminding
my downfall

in kerrazy graffiti writing on a suit jacket.

Looked like a pretentious arse everytime i wore it out. No idea what i've done with it.

Length was "long". girth was, well 44 inches (as i'm quite tall and have a big chest)
( Mister B is eating an icanhazcheezburger with lmaonaise, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 17:12, Reply)

My mum
Even when doing "coffee with the ladies", has on many occasions decided to wear her South Park t-shirt, picturing Kyle projectile vomiting on to Wendy, with the caption "EWWWW!".
(talbo, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 16:21, Reply)

Not so much a disaster and not mine either....
But Steptoe's story reminded me of one of my own. Back when I worked in a hotel they organised, as they did every year, the obligatory Halloween party.

We were warned not to bring our own drink as such behaviour could lose us our job, but neither caring much for the job or the warnings of the management, most of us frontline staff brought stuff anyway.

Cue myself and my mate in the toilet sneaking some gin into a glass each when the door opens and fellow waiter walks in. He was from a different department, a bit younger and newer than us two, so I had a small concern he might grass on us. I could tell my mate was thinking the same so there was a few awkward moments in the bog as I wondered how to strike up a conversation.

I was dressed as a commando, as I am every year now, and my mate in some silk Chinese outfit. The other guy had black boots, black jeans, black shirt and a long black leather trenchcoat, down to his feet. I thought I would comment on his costume as not many people had been talking to him so far that night. I said: "Nice mate. Matrix?".

His reply: "I'm not dressed up."

So having suitably failed to ease any tension, my mate and I sniggered our way out of the bog and back to the party to sup our gin. To be fair, he never did grass us in.

Length + Girth = Usual joke.
(Dr_Faustus filius of a femina canis, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 13:56, Reply)

Walk like an Egyptian
In school we all used to have to participate in these pretty awful plays. One production was Jason & The Technicolour Dreamcoat. There was no escape and I had to take part, albeit in the choir.

Our costumes were fucking awful... Mine was a cardboard suit with dry pasta shells stuck on it and sprayed gold. Not only did I feel like a cunt I looked it too.

Saying that, it would have looked quality at a fancy dress party these days...
(Fatty Thornton, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 13:42, Reply)

Year 5 school disco.
I decide that my turquoise sparkly swimming costume will look cool under my jeans in a sort of bodysuit way and nobody would notice that it was actually a swimming costume.

All night I got laughed at by the wannabe popular girls (ie every other school had them so they decided to appoint themselves as them) saying 'Why are you wearing a swimming costume?'

Bumflakes.
(and now for someone completely different, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 13:03, Reply)

Hair Horror?
In the early 80s I moved from the quiet Kent suburb of Orpington to swinging Lunnen Town. On the first day in town I walked through Greenwich park to the town hall to sign on. Immediately I attracted cries of derision and 'Neil' impressions for my long hippy hair. (Acceptable in Hippy Kent, not so in trendy Lunnen apparently!)
The very next day I went to the local hair place for something radical with my new boss.
"Give him the same as me." Say the boss guy.

twenty minutes later I emerge with.....

.... A mullet.

Grim? I got married a few months later, and the artist formerly known as Mrs Steve never forgave me for the mullet in the wedding pictures. She got her revenge though... she became as fat as a whale after that.
(Mr Steve is jobless and fancyfree!, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 12:23, Reply)

bagpuss
once upon a time at a fancy dress party, i did the whole 'wear a hawaiian shirt and say you're a surfer' thing. which didn't pass with a girl who had made an entire bagpuss outfit.

so she made me wear the bagpuss outfit, despite being twice the size of her in every direction. in every picture i have a nice pair of giblets.
(blowski, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 9:19, Reply)

I thought it was "artistic."
I had a whole bunch of crap 4-by-6 photos...blurry ones, duplicates, generally the pictures I didn't need and which would have ended up in the bin had I not compulsively held on to every snapshot I ever took. I decided, hey, why not make a dress out of these rejects, with a couple of train timetables thrown in for good measure? The straps were made out of the negatives, and the whole get-up reached down to my knees. Nice.

...So I made it. At the time, I thought the dress was quite cool. However, because all I had to work with were paper, photos, and clear tape, I had to roll myself into the dress - lie on the floor, roll myself up in it like the filling in a taco, then tape it shut.

I thought I looked fantastic, but there was one problem: taped-together photos aren't very flexible. After taping myself in, I somehow rolled and struggled to my feet, and then waddled as far as the door before I realised the world was not ready for my DIY expertise.
( KersaI Missive Free Michael Shields! with Monday's Liverpool Echo, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 5:03, Reply)

Hmmm
My parents on one of their trips to the UK purchased one of those union jack shopping bags - you know the sort all shiney and pvc on one side, well anyway this shopping bag quickly became my union jack mini skirt with the help of the scissors & sewing machine - I adored that skirt even though it was little more than a waistband and gave just about as much coverage, but did I care did I buggary I liked the attention it got me.

I'm a girth not length girl
(dwf_II, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 4:53, Reply)

Siblings
Me and my brother are 2 years apart in age and as kids my mother used to dress us up either similar or in exactly the same clothes. By similar i mean exactly the same clothes but in opposite colours.

I used to detest wearing the same outfit as my brother, in the hall in our house is a photo of us, both sporting very fine tailored sailor suits. You know the type, the blue and white striped ones. Add to this a mop of shockingly blond hair (think boris johnson) and you have two little twats.

Thats one of the things i will always hate my mother for
(PieEater, Mon 28 Aug 2006, 2:46, Reply)