We all love new clothes, but at least if you make them yourself you are being a bit more ecological.
Something is clear from the outset when speaking to Jane Asher, and it’s not just because she’s friends with Joanna Lumley – she is absolutely fabulous. Speaking about her recent part in Somerset Maugham comedy The Circle at the Orange Tree in Richmond, the 77-year-old oozes pizzazz, an irresistible aura and a wicked sense of humour. “She’s a woman my age, hanging on and pretending that she’s in her fifties with far too much make-up and violently dyed red hair,” Asher, whose hair still glows auburn, says about the character. “So nothing like me, darling!”
Starting her career at just six in the 1952 film Mandy and starring in scores of classic television and film classics, Asher became a cast member of London’s glitterati and a firm fixture in theatre. To arty types, though, she’s also known for something once destined to enter obscurity: Jane Asher’s Costume Book.
Published in 1983, it’s a starry-eyed guide to creating 100 fancy-dress outfits out of things you can find around the house, complete with suggested fabrics, precise dimensions and assembly instructions. It was rediscovered a couple of years ago and posted on Twitter by poet Alina Pleskovao, who’d found a copy left on the kerb by a neighbour. Delightfully kitsch and chintzy, its earnest portraits of models in ludicrous get-ups twinkle with a childlike wonder. Nonsense abounds – costumes include Scotch Egg (a tartan Humpty Dumpty making use of cereal boxes); Peter Carrot (a corrugated wadding root vegetable); and A Pair of the Same Suit (a two-piece, two-person, suit that makes David Byrne’s signature tailoring look positively tapered).
It wasn’t Asher’s first book; Jane Asher’s Party Cakes was published a year earlier. “That just came about because I’d been making these sorts of rather silly intricate fun cakes for some time and no one else was really doing them,” she remembers. Galvanised by a publisher who told her that “actresses don’t write books”, she secured an offer from a small publishing house and gave them a bestseller in return. “It was extraordinary. It’s where the whole book thing stopped being a hobby and became something much more,” she says. Next she turned to something with which she had personal, professional and parental experience – costumes. “We were constantly having to produce costumes that don’t necessarily cost a lot of money but have a fantastic effort… so I thought this could be quite fun,” she recalls.
Assembling an ensemble cast of seamstresses led by costume designers Vin Burnham and Jill Thraves, Asher began to create an outlandish array of outfits. “Most of them were made at my house. I’d be sketching the ideas and helping with a bit of sewing,” she recalls. “I don’t think coming up with ideas was much of a problem. Because once you start thinking in a lateral way, there’s so many things you can do,” she says. True, but who else would have had the chutzpah to fashion a judicial wig from toilet rolls?
Every costume was photographed by Asher’s friend and Sunday Times photojournalist Bryan Wharton, better known for capturing warzones than a Loch Ness Monster made of yoghurt cartons. The models were a mix of famous and not-so-famous friends and family. “With my good friend Joanna Lumley, you could put her in a bit of crêpe paper and she’d be fantastic,” she says. Other stellar muses include Monty Python member Terry Jones (as Birthday Cake) and actor Martin Shaw (as Club Sandwich).
While the visuals might have aged, the ethos hasn’t; dressing up for all ages is still magical, an innocent form of escapism built on arts, crafts and a lot of sticky tape. Fancy dress still gives us all a chance to shed our skins, play a part and have a party, flipping the script on our quotidian lives and casting ourselves in a new role. It might seem silly and gimmicky, but throw on an extravagant hat, flamboyant frock or a clownish pair of shoes and you’re guaranteed to feel and act differently. Costumes stretch clothes’ personality-altering effect to the extreme, letting us spin new yarns.
The creative process is just as important. Children know the joy of raiding a dressing-up drawer or taping together trash to transform it into treasure. And parents know the ungodly fear that a last-minute costume request can instil. Asher’s introduction to the book captures this: “By the way, Mum, I need to be the Archangel Gabriel by 9 o’clock tomorrow morning for the school play,” it reads. “It’s absolutely true,” she says now. “It’s terrifying!”
In fact, as with the party cakes, Asher was ahead of her time. Going viral during lockdown, her book was rediscovered at a time when we were yearning to dress up to go out, and just preceded the dopamine dressing that followed. “Baking went crazy too,” Asher notes.
Now, faced by a cost-of-living crisis and climate catastrophe, the publication’s make-do-and-mend approach also feels particularly timely. “We have tried to keep the materials as inexpensive as possible, often using old curtains, lavatory paper, cardboard boxes and so on,” it reads. “I have incorporated a lot of theatrical tricks for making an effect cheaply.” It’s a reminder that fancy dress, for most of us, is our first experience of upcycling, duvet capes and all. Crafting costumes is also a gateway to the world of sewing, repairs and alterations. “I love mending,” Asher says, admiring the French ability to buy a garment and then tweak it or get it tailored to fit perfectly.
She’s the first to admit that this sustainable approach wasn’t necessarily intentional. “I’d have to pretend it was all to save the planet,” Asher says, recalling that Friends of the Earth at the time were billed as cranks. “I don’t think we were thinking along those lines then, but it’s extraordinary now.” She recently found out about the environmental impact of sequins (their carcinogenic chemicals aren’t so pretty) while making a shimmery Nativity Star outfit for her great-granddaughter. “We all love new clothes, but at least if you make them yourself you’re being a bit more ecological,” she continues.
Even her vision of The Future, the title of one of the book’s costumes, was impressively accurate. “Who’s to know what we shall be wearing in the future – but it’s fun to concoct something imaginary,” she wrote at the time. “No doubt microcomputers in the home will eventually be programmed to do almost anything we want, and perhaps they will be made to look more human than they do at present,” it predicts.
For Asher, these computers are exciting. They did, after all, help propel the Costume Book back into the spotlight. “Technology is wonderful. Of course it has its dark side… but I love the way we can share these fantastic ideas,” she says. “There’s so much talent out there, even just making these wonderful double entendre about the costumes; they are very, very funny,” she continues.
Does she fancy doing a sequel? “People have hinted to me before, why don’t you do another one?” she says. “But I think, to be honest, I wouldn’t dare because the things on social media are so amazing, there’s nothing I could add.” One thing she does hope for, though, is a return of the glitz and glamour of the past, of excuses to not just dress up to the nines, but the tens and beyond. “It’s frustrating in a way talking about costumes because there aren’t quite so many occasions when one can go really, at all,” she says.
For now, she’s happy to stick to her newfound obsession: sewing. “In my lockdown my love of sewing went bananas… a small hobby became something much more,” she says. “Now I’m a bit obsessed with it. If you said to me you can just have a few weeks all on your own doing nothing but sewing, I would love it.” Perhaps, I’ll request exactly that from her: I wouldn’t mind my very own Scotch Egg costume…
