Halloween children get professional

Published on Saturday 24 October 2009 19:56

FORGET ghouls and ghosties this Halloween. Nobody wants their child to grow up to be a glow-in-the-dark skeleton or a witch in a frock of cobwebs. This year's smartest guisers will be dressed as advocates, judges, chefs, surgeons and architects.

Flesh-eating zombie masks and corpse bride outfits might still be the bestsellers for Halloween, but vocational costumes are making a comeback, fancy-dress makers said yesterday. Gordon Brown has snapped up a hand-made barrister's gown and fake fur wig for his children.

So too has David Cameron. The craze for aping the best-paid and most prestigious professionals – at least among the great and good – was sparked by Maggie Toy, who makes the costumes in the kitchen of her London home.

"I started because my own son wanted to dress like daddy, who is a barrister," she said. "The costumes are just like the real English court dress. We have fake fur, instead of horse's hair, for the wigs, which have the authentic bows down the back. Everything else is exactly like the real thing, with white tabs."

Other professions pose bigger challenges. "I am an architect and I wanted to honour my own profession. But it is really hard to say what an architect looks like. All the ones I know dress in black. So I made a costume of a black trousers, black roll-neck sweater and Le Corbusier glasses. To be honest, the kids like the legal wigs the best."

Toy – whose company is called the Toy Factory – also makes a Suffragette outfit, which was bought by actress Jessica Stevenson for her daughter, to mark the 90th anniversary of women winning the vote. Toy has a chef's costume too, and numbers Jamie Oliver among her customers.

She said: "It is really hard to get something, especially for boys. Often you are left with a choice of a monster or a fighting super-hero.

"A lot of what I call the vocational costumes are bought by, say, barristers for their children. They way I look at it is that such people are all super-heroes in their own way.

"And I am not sure I want my boys to get a costume that encourages them to fight. I would rather try to gently encourage them into thinking a little broader about life; when they look at their school building to wonder who might have designed it or ask what happens when somebody has done something wrong."

Dani Garavelli, Scotland on Sunday columnist and mother of three, yesterday said the trend was a sign of "pushy-pushy parenting gone mad". She said: "Why don't they just let their children be children? Trying to turn them into little professionals at the age of seven is aspirational parenting taken to extremes."

In recent years, the only vocational costumes on sale or for hire at Halloween have been for the 999 professions: police officers, firefighters, nurses and doctors. Children, however, tend to stick to super-heroes or ghouls of one ilk or another.

Asda yesterday said its top selling costume this year has been a spider ballgown, for 10. Most popular outfits for boys are glow-in-the-dark skeletons and caped vampires, at 8.

Retailers, meanwhile, claimed to be bracing themselves for a bumper Halloween, which falls on Saturday. Asda expects sales to rise 5 per cent, with US-style pumpkins far outselling traditional Scottish tumshie lanterns. Other shops, however, privately admitted they expected to see more children guising in homemade costumes. "Look out for a lot of ghosties made of old sheets," said one disgruntled seller.

Angels, the fancy-dress giant, however, expects to sell 2 million worth of costumes alone. Planet Retail, the market intelligence firm, is predicting UK consumers will spend 235m on Halloween merchandise this year, up from just 12m at the beginning of the decade.

America, meanwhile, has seen a last minute craze for "Balloon Boy" Halloween costumes. The $19.99 Canadian-made kits are made up of a cardboard box, string, a balloon and a sticker reading "Hello My Name is Falcon" (after the six-year-old who was wrongly reported missing in his parents' weather balloon last week).