Ladies Fancy Dress

6 tips for choosing your costume:

• Jot some ideas down about what you'd like to wear. Think of the actual outfit rather than a specific costume: trousers, mini skirt, long dress, outrageous comic character costume, sexy costume. This will give you a starting point to build your costume on.

• Does quality matter or is the fun element more important? - if you were attending a masquerade wedding then obviously the quality of the outfit and matching accessories must be pretty high standard and you should think about hiring an outfit or buying one of the better quality costumes.

• Will you wear the outfit more than once? Many ladies fancy dress can be worn more than once and are suitable for numerous occasions. If you are on a budget then choose an outfit that you'd be just as comfortable wearing to a family fancy dress celebration or the office Xmas party.

• Should you take comfort into consideration? Or is the Wow impact more important to you on this occasion? Visualise your entrance to the party, would the outfit make you feel comfortable, squirm with embarrassment or are you excited just thinking about it? Decide on the impact you want to have.

• Jot down some accessories you would love to wear and make a list of the accessories you would never wear. If you can't stand to wear a mask then this step will rule out the fancy dress costumes that are reliant on masks.

Do you want to allocate a large part of your budget to accessories or would you rather make this as minimal as possible? Choosing the finishing touches for your costume can be fun and sometimes it's the accessories that will determine whether your fancy dress outfit will work.

• Does it come in my size? Ladies fancy dress sizing is pretty easy to work out and good websites will have measurement information or will sell their outfits in dress sizes. Once you've determined what size you need then check on availability. Can you order this outfit in your size?

Writing a checklist of do's and don'ts for your costume will give you a good overall picture of the category of outfits you should be looking at. Start looking for outfits plenty of time before the party, take your time and if you don't like your first choice go back and start again.