Fancy Dress is For Children, Stop Wearing it in Nightclubs

Funny, isn't it, how the fears and anxieties you develop in early childhood follow you until the day you die? Well, it's less funny than utterly, abjectly, life-ruiningly awful really, but you get the point. The things that rationally or otherwise take you out of the blissful amniotic bubble of your first few years and thrust you unknowingly and unwittingly into the pain and horror of life after the age of about six or so don't just vanish or dissipate; they fester and rot and keep you awake night after night.

Now, I know, you're reading a dance music website rather than a peer-reviewed psychoanalytical journal, but bear with me, because I'm about to join the dots between psychosocial development and clubbing.

Ever since I can remember, and who knows what pre-remembrance memories have been repressed deep into recesses of my unconscious, I've found the concept of fancy dress parties terrifying. Part of that fear, I assume anyway, stems from a moment in time that arrives when I least expect it, broadcast in crystal clear Ultra HD. I am at a fifth birthday party, dressed as a pirate. The party is taking place at the house of a childhood friend who lived on a farm. On that farm in a barn. We are playing hide and seek and I'm hiding from the seeker in that barn. The air smells like grass and fire and broken engines and I am grasping my plastic cutlass, eyes tightly shut, heart pounding. No one has come to find me yet, and so I explore the barn, taking tentative steps into the darkness. Here in the dark, my hand rests on something. That something is, to all intents and purposes, a severed head. I am shuddering and screaming and I want to be found right this second because as soon as I am found I can ask to go home, to get out of this pirate outfit, to thrust my head under the warm water of the bath, and let this day end.

Of course it wasn't actually a body-less skull. The thing that had inspired such world-changing fear was, in fact, one of those heads that hairdressers train on. Nevertheless, over two decades on, the very thought of fancy dress sends me back to that primal encounter, an encounter which left an indelible mark on my person: I will always associate the act of dressing up with a supreme sense of terror.

Yet recently this irrational fear has mingled with the horrors of the real world. In an attempt to stand out in a market that's saturated beyond belief, promoters and venue owners have to think of innovative ways to sell their club nights. With actual innovation being quite difficult to come by, we've seen a resurgence across clubland of legitimized, actual fancy dress parties.

Now, obvious point here but dressing up is an inherent part of the clubbing experience. Even the uniform that we attach to the Oceanas of this world (the striped shirt, bootcut jeans, and school shoes look) is a means of using a wardrobe for the purpose of reinvention. Nightlife lets us pretend we really are more than our jobs, whether or not that's the case in reality, and that pretence is usually rooted in a sartorial basis. In a thousand different ways, most of us find ourselves dressing up to let our hair down, weekend after weekend.

There is, however, a massive difference between dressing up and dressing up. The italicized version is an abomination, a dullards way of disguising their own lack of, well, anything. The chances are that any party you attend after the age of say, eleven, where the majority of the room are in some form of costume, whether it's Super Mario or Mario from Big Brother 9, Jean-Claude Juncker or Jean-Claude Van Damme, will be terrible. There are a variety of reasons for that.

The first is that fancy dress is a perfect signifier is the epitome of forced fun. As soon as a nightclub has to tell you to have fun any chance of actually having fun evaporates into the air, atomising alongside the stilton-scented vape-smoke.

"YOU," these clubs and festivals scream through tannoys disguised as pineapples, buoys, or medical waste wheelie bins, "ARE GOING TO HAVE THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE."

How—you shout back over the deafening din of a Patrick Topping set and the yammer of a thousand blokes dressed as Borat howling "YEAH MATE JUST NEAR THE FRONT MATE," into their phones—how are you going to ensure that I get my money's worth from another dismal day party thrown in an unusual London location that just as usual happens to be in a convention centre with a decent sized smoking area.

"WELL," the disembodied voices yell back, "YOU'VE GOT TO LEAVE THE VENUE AND COME BACK DRESSED AS EITHER FREDDIE MERCURY, CARMEN MIRANDA, OR THE ALLEGED WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE CHEAT, MAJOR CHARLES INGRAM."

The rise of the fancy dress party hints at a broader sociological phenomenon that's threatening to see an entire generation obsessed with negating reality via a dismal return to an imagined childhood, a sea of people doomed to a life of shitting themselves in front of old episodes of Tracey Beaker as they run their furry tongues round the sites where their now-disintegrated teeth once where—a truly devastating descent into infantilism.

Believe it or not, there is a time where childish things need to be put away, and not just printed onto a onesie or whatever the fuck it is students wear these days. Fancy dress is one such thing. Think about it: what kind of self-respecting adult actually engages with fancy dress? It'll either be some red-faced systems analyst who likes to have his own tie stuffed down his gob by a matron at that creepy school dinners place just off Oxford Street, a bloke in a panda-suit giggling his way through Rochdale town centre en route to meet the region's five other fur-fanatics, or two lads in flares shaking a leg down the front at of Magic Door.

Each of those iterations says the same thing about the costume-wearer: I am pained by the idea of existing in the present and thus willing do anything and everything I can to return to the womb. A nightclub, with all its illusions about inclusion and warmth and communality is enough of a womb, thanks.

There is also a more serious point here, that of cultural appropriation. When elrow, for example, throw another Bollywood themed party, what do they actually want from it? Honestly, what is the intention? Is it, as I suspect they'd claim, nothing more than a harmless bit of fun, no worse than, say, wearing a string of onions and a beret or a matador's cape and a pair of castanets? A cheeky wink at the world and it's many cultural variances, all of which are allegedly ripe for repurposing as a costume for an unimaginative business studies student desperate for an excuse to do a few bumps of a Sunday afternoon in mid-summer.

Well, no, it isn't really, is it? It's rank cultural imperialism masquerading as banter, a modern update on an office joker donning an afro wig and doing his best Jim Davidson impression. The idea that having a good time, or creating a "fun loving vibe" or however else these parties sell themselves to potential media partners, is permission to run riot over cultural identities is a self-evident fallacy. How do we tally the sight of white dancers dressed "Bollywood" gear with the idea of inclusion that we so often come back to when we try and justify clubbing as anything more than an enjoyable diversion from work? We can't. There is no way to do so.

And that's the problem with fancy dress in general: in a perverse way it imbues going out with a sense of genuine importance. You might not think that as you slide into a Danny Zuko style leather jacket ahead of another day party, but it's true. You've made a financial and emotional investment that didn't need to be made. You've fallen into a trap set for you by wily promoters. You've lined their pockets yet again. Oh, and you look like a twat. Sorry.

Josh is on Twitter