Is it time World Book Day ditched fancy dress?

If you’ve entered a supermarket lately, you may have noticed the annual explosion of wackiness and colour on the clothing rails, which can only signal one thing: World Book Day is upon us once again. A Very Hungry Caterpillar costume your toddler will have outgrown by next year, both physically and intellectually? That will be £17. An outfit from that famous novel Toy Story? It could cost you £15 if you buy at full price.

No wonder this worthy attempt to encourage reading is prone, now, to engender a collective groan. Not because World Book Day’s mission to promote books among the young is not commendable: it’s hard to think of a better habit than reading for our children. Each year, 15 million book tokens are sent to children to buy one of the specially published World Book Day titles or get £1 off another book. But somewhere over the years since this laudable event was created by UNESCO in 1995, the cosplay element seems to have taken over. And parents’ loss is, as ever, very much Amazon’s gain.

Katie Roberton from Bournemouth is an artist, but just like the non-artists out there, she baulks at the idea of whipping up an elaborate Willy Wonka outfit to be worn once and discarded. And so, like many, she has each year resorted to buying a costume online for her son, who is now 12. 

“It’s such a waste of money,” she says. “I’m going to have to go straight to Amazon and buy some complete rubbish that will be worn once and then lurk in the wardrobe for three years. We’ve got enough in the house already.”

In these straitened times especially, she believes it simply places too much financial pressure on parents: “I don’t have the money, I’m really struggling at the moment, but I’ll still buy something if I have to,” she says. “My son would feel like an idiot if he wasn’t dressed up.”

She prefers the idea, being put into practice by a number of schools this year, of inviting children to come dressed in comfortable clothes instead.

Felicity Hannah, presenter of Radio 4’s Money Box Live, is among those whose children’s schools have gone in this direction. “Because of the cost of living, instead of coming to school in costume, we are having a Get Comfy and Read day,’” her sons’ school has told parents. “I love it!” Hannah wrote on Twitter/X. “The MONEY the parents will save and the WASTE that will be avoided.”

Roberton, founder of ceramics business Outlandish Creations, agrees this would be preferable. “I think it was better when parents didn’t have to buy an outfit for any occasion, be it leaving nursery or school prom,” she says.

It’s difficult to precisely pinpoint when World Book Day, which was first introduced in the UK and Ireland in 1997, segued from a celebration of reading to a collective donning of Marvel superhero costumes. For while the national dress-up is the element that gives children joy, it’s also the part that makes parents despair – and arguably deflects from the value of the day itself. 

In 2020 alone, over one million £1 books were gifted in the UK and Ireland in just five weeks. Of children receiving free school meals, more than one in five said the book they bought with their World Book Day tokens was the first book they owned. Some 66 per cent of primary school teachers said World Book Day had changed reading habits. In short, it makes a difference.

As Helen Tamblyn-Saville, owner of Wonderland Bookshop in Retford, Nottinghamshire, puts it, encouraging children to love reading is among the most important things you can do for them. “Books can change lives,” she says. “But I 100 per cent understand why people dread the whole dressing up aspect [of World Book Day]. It sometimes feels as if the dressing up element has dominated a fantastic day of reading.” 

Tamblyn-Saville is part of the wider World Book Day strategic advisory group but argues that while costumes can be part of the celebrations, they’re “not the main purpose” of it. 

She also points out that most characters in children’s books are in fact children wearing everyday clothing. As are adults in books – potentially making it harder too for teachers, who are often pressurised to join in. Sue Bordley, an English teacher and author of books including Have Fun, Be Safe, has previously gone into the secondary school where she works wearing a flowery dress on World Book Day and declared she was Curley’s wife from Of Mice and Men. “I’ve done it in the least ‘doing it’ way I can,” she admits. “Some colleagues have come in as Harry Potter or Miss Trunchbull [from Roald Dahl’s Matilda], but that’s not for me.”

There is also a growing understanding that for some children too, dressing up is at best annoying, and at worst, upsetting. Bordley says that her own children, now aged 16 and 14, share her dislike of dressing up, so she would always think of book characters who wore school uniform or jeans and a t-shirt for them to dress as on World Book Days past. 

“For a lot of kids, it isn’t really fun,” she says.

The trouble with dressing up for World Book Day is that people tend to work backwards from the costume, rather than have the book as the starting point, suggests Elaine Adams, joint founder and chief executive of Assisted Reading for Children (ARCh) Oxfordshire.

At the moment, it can sometimes end up being, instead, more about what families happen to have in the dressing up box, she fears. “People think, ‘I’ve got one of these, will this do?’ rather than thinking of the book or the story,” she says. “It’s such an opportunity to highlight books and stories, and it seems to be missed, and not hitting the nail on the head.”