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You can have so much fun with the American West as the theme for your fancy dress – its great fun for men and women, there’s lots of options and an almost endless amount of costumes available. 

Evoking memories of daring buccaneers and favourite characters from the silver screen, pirate costumes are always great fun for any fancy dress occasion.  Whether you want to recreate the legendary Jack Sparrow or you’re looking for a ghost or zombie costume for Halloween, there’s always something to fit the bill.

Everyone loves a uniform from time to time, and there is nothing that looks sharper than an army costume.  Whether it’s classic American GI or one of the famous British Army WWII type, they look great and are sure to get a reaction from your guests or hosts.  Glamorous, stylish and classic, they evoke memories of a time gone by and look great on everyone.

If you don’t fancy a full army type costume, you could try something along the lines of a land girl – the Woman’s Land Army was a British Institution famous in the Second World War for keeping the home fires burning while the men were away fighting.  There are many famous images of these women, as well as depictions in film and TV (most recently the TV series ‘Land Girls’).

Of course, despite the hardships of the times, the 1940’s were synonymous with glamour and these types of costumes are a great way to dress up and play with the red lips and ‘victory roll’ hairstyles that were the order of the day back then.  If the 1940’s

Who hasn’t watched at least one movie and loved the characters style so much that they’ve wished they could go out dressed like them?  Cosplay is now hugely popular in Asia, America and Europe for this reason, with people finding ever more imaginative and intricate ways to  dress up as their favourite movie characters.

Whether you feel like spending an evening as Angelina Jolie’s Tomb Raider or packing a six pack as the Flash, there are now so many movie costumes you are bound to be able to find something to suit your style.

The recent trend for superhero movies means that there are lots of instantly recognisable and fun costumes available right off the peg – The Flash, Suicide Squad, Batman, and Frozen are perennially popular options for fancy dress, and are also great for theme parties (room full of superheroes, anyone?).  If you feel like something more classic, perhaps you could go for Zorro, or Morticia Addams.  Ghostbusters is both retro and on trend, and great for guys or

Alice in Wonderland is of course the fantastic novel by Lewis Carroll which has spawned a multitude of film, cartoon and television spin offs.  The characters in the books and screenplays are wild, wacky and larger than life and give some great opportunities for costumes that can be as traditional or modern as you like.

With movies made in both the 50’s and in 2010 (the eccentric Tim Burton masterpiece), the characters are recognisable, colourful and sure to get a reaction.  One of the most famous costumes if surely the one that Alice wore in the Disney cartoon – her blue and white dress is now so synonymous with the character that any adaptation without her wearing it is almost unthinkable. Other potential Alice in Wonderland costumes are the Queen of Hearts (or one of her soldiers), Tweedledum and Tweedledee or, of course, The Mad Hatter.  Whether you chose Johnny Depp’s depiction or one of the more classic versions, there are fancy dress options for all of them.

If you fancy trying

If there’s one thing that you can say about the 1920’s, it’s that they knew how to dress.  1920’s costumes are amazing fun to wear – evoking memories of a time when men wore suits so sharp that you could cut yourself on them and women were experimenting for the first time with shorter hemlines and even shorter hair, it’s hard to do 20’s and not look classy.

Flapper dresses were all the rage, and came in dozens of varieties.  Starting with very conservative styles with simple dropped and tightly pleated skirts, square and sailor style necklines were almost obligatory at the time.  However, as you may be more familiar with, flapper girls went in for some incredibly intricate and ornate dresses which literally dripped with sequins and beads – they were particularly famous for the beaded skirts that moved with them when they danced, and allowed them to perform the back kicks that made ‘The Charleston’ such a well known dance of the time.

Guys of the time weren’t far behind in terms of

OK, cheesy song lyrics aside, Cheerleader Costumes Melbourne are great fun and are perfect for almost any fancy dress occasion from birthday parties to Halloween.  If you do have a Halloween costume in mind, you could always go for a crazy ghost or zombie twist – for zombies, you will want to experiment with either plenty of gray/white face paints and fake blood, or perhaps a zombie mask.  Ghost cheerleaders can be achieved with white face paint and stacks of talc in the hair – you could always get your boyfriend to come along as Michael Myers (Halloween) for an extra creepy touch.

Another great way to do ‘cheerleader’ this year is for a group of you to get together and come as an entire cheerleading squad!  This is also a great option for Hen nights, and is guaranteed to turn some heads wherever you go.  Maybe you could look for costumes in your school or colleges colours – if you do go down this route though, you might want to have a couple of cheers prepared for later in the

Fancy dress is a great way to liven up a fun occasion – perhaps a birthday or anniversary party, staff leaving do or graduation party.  Recent years have even seen fancy dress weddings!  The great thing is that the variety of fancy dress costumes is now so wide that you really are limited only by your imagination.

One really fun thing to do is to have a theme party, which can also be helpful in that it gives people an idea of what they’re looking for in their outfit.  Movie nights, such as James Bond or the currently massively popular Suicide Squad are great for getting people’s imaginations to run wild, and you can also have great fun creating movie themed food and drinks to add to the atmosphere.  If film isn’t your thing though, there are still plenty of options – book characters such as Alice in Wonderland, Harry Potter or Where’s Wally are all just as much fun for adults as they are children.

Of course, plenty of people prefer free reign if they’re getting to dress up, and

Zombies – there are so many options for zombie costumes here, there’s no way for the genre to get old.  While you could always go for the good, old fashioned classic zombie look (which is always a winner), there are plenty of other routes to go down if you want to do something different.

Perhaps you might want to try zombie-fying one of your favourite characters?  Alice in Wonderland (sometimes known as Malice in Horrorland in this much creepier incarnation) is a good choice, but you could even go as ‘out there’ as turning up as zombie Mario or Luigi.   It would definitely be a little bit different!

Of course, the great thing about zombie costumes is that if you’re a little bit creative you can have endless fun with masks, face paints and contact lenses to make your outfit as authentically scary as you want.  There are some incredible stage make up tutorials doing the rounds on YouTube which mean that achieving a really professional (and terrifying) look is far more achievable than

Halloween has grown so much in popularity that options for Halloween Costumes are now almost limitless.  Although the standard scary costumes still top the list, there are plenty of options if you would like to try something a little different.

Ladies might like to try one of the new and very on trend Harley Quinn costumes, although there are plenty of other possibilities – some of the Day of the Dead costumes on offer now are stunning, and offer the opportunity to play around with as many (or as few) accessories as you would like.  They can be teamed with intricate masks, face paints and wigs or left as they are if you feel like being more conservative.  If you fancy something more subtly sexy, you could try one of the Arabian Genie costumes – they require very little in the way of accessories, all you need is a bit of smoky eye make-up and you’re good to go.

The great news is that guys are far better catered for than ever before when it comes to costumes now, too.  Gone are the