It's about time the topic of fashion gets a blog entry of its own.

The word most characteristic of in how far people here dress differently than the way we're used to is probably the word "less". Sometimes you can't help suspecting there is an unwritten and unspoken law saying that it is every Brit's duty to wear the smallest possible number of clothes. Or is there another way of explaining why

• loads of girls combine a short top with tights (or -->jeggings) and boots but leave the skirt at home and
• virtually nobody puts on a coat on nights out (yes, we're still in England, and no, despite global warming it is not warm hereabouts, especially not at night)?

Definition #11: jeggings: leggings that look like denim trousers. And look horrible.

But probably the most irritating "less" reveals itself in the length of dresses. You have to feel blessed if both of a girl's bum cheeks are covered. Because often enough they aren't. A girl in an average length dress for a night out in Sheffield would probably be classified as "naked" in Germany, just to give you a rough idea of what we're talking here.

Another remarkable difference is the amount of fancy dress going on.

Definition #12: fancy dress: dressing up based on a particular theme, eg. sports, super heroes, film stars etc. (= Mottoparty)

While you and we have come to know fancy dress parties as events that sometimes take place in shared flats, effectively every organised meeting at night in Sheffield is a fancy dress meeting: socials of sports and other societies, birthday parties etc.

With the additional disparity, however, that all these events are scheduled to move to one of the night clubs after the kick-off in a pub or bar, leading to a wild mixture of action heroes (like spiderman or super mario), monsters (like Frankenstein and zombies) and all sorts of other fashion outrages on the dancefloor.

Last night's volleyball social was themed "professions". After some time of fruitless hard thinking we had simply popped into the pound shop hoping for inspiration to descend onto us. Ten minutes later, arguably the cheapest fancy dress ever had been born: for a pound each, we bought multi-purpose overalls as well as sets of goggles and gas masks facilitating our and Nick's housemate Cat's metamorphosis into nuclear reactor workers:

At least that's what we hoped we looked like. - Most people thought we're chemists or something:-P

The other socials had come down handsomely as well, so amongst others, the smurfs were present, too:

Summing up, the normal thing to do for a night out here is either fancy dress or dress up. The latter of which, as explained above, rather means "dress less". The only unnormal thing to do: wearing normal clothes...