The Alexandra Palace (Ally Pally) is no stranger to fancy dress - but the World Darts Championship  brings a whole new level of dressing up to one of the world’s best known venues. Nobody is quite sure why darts, in particular, has become a fancy dress spectator sport but it’s a joyous and sometimes quite weird experience to watch the cameras pan across the crowds supporting their favourite players like Phil (The Power) Taylor and Michael (Mighty Mike) van Gerwen.

 

One of the great features of this event is the group costuming that takes place. From its beginnings when one or two people in the crowd dressed up, often in pantomime outfits, the Ally Pally darts bash has become a group fancy dress extravaganza. This year is no exception - while there have been some wonderful creative costuming attempts, such as the box of crayons, and some superhero sets that were really impressive, the notable feature of this year’s championship was the face-painting, particularly the dartboard costumes where people spent hours creating dartboard faces and the minions - some of those single eyes were so good they were creepy! Good make-up can take your fancy dress to the next level, and we’ve got a family sized face paint kit to make it easier for you to achieve something really spectacular.

 

But as ever, the winner in the costume cool stakes came down to this year’s top film - the storm troopers!

 Darts Fancy Dress

 

Tips for group fancy dress

 

If you’d like to organise a group fancy dress costuming there are a three key tips to bear in mind:

 

  1. If you’re not of uniform height/size (as sporting teams, squaddies etc often are) you might benefit from using variety to your advantage - we’ve seen the seven dwarfs where they ranged from basketball player tall to child-sized. That kind of quirkiness often gets more response that perfect attention to detail.
  2. If you have children or toddlers, definitely let them be the central character - baby Blues Brothers/Terminators etc are always a hoot
  3. Creating a little act or skit will often win you lots of applause - so if you can rehearse a few dance steps or a comedy routine that you can perform you’re bound to please the crowd.