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Wardrobe / Guides / Planning a Princess Birthday

Planning a Princess Birthday

Running a princess birthday party: what to buy, what to skip, and how to get one good photograph Part of the Funna wardrobe of princess dress costumes.

A princess birthday does not need a budget. It needs one good gown, somewhere to spin, and a plan for the twenty minutes when everybody is waiting for cake.

The dress comes first

Buy the birthday child's gown early enough to try it on and wash it once before the day. A dress that arrives the night before and turns out to be a size small has no solutions. If the party has a colour, pick the gown to match it rather than the other way round — a blue dress against a pink room photographs badly, and that is the one picture that will exist in ten years.

Do not costume the guests

Children arriving in their own clothes and being handed a crown at the door works better than asking eight families to buy costumes. A box of crowns, wands and gloves by the door turns every guest into part of the party in about four seconds and costs a fraction of what full outfits would.

Give them something to do in costume

The gap between arriving and eating is where a party goes wrong. Three things that reliably work: a procession from one end of the room to the other with music, a game where everybody has to freeze in a pose when the music stops, and a corner with a mirror where children can look at themselves. The mirror is the single most used object at every dress-up party I have run.

One photograph, taken early

Take the group picture in the first half hour, before anything is spilled and before anybody is tired. Stand them against a plain wall rather than a decorated one — patterned backgrounds and patterned costumes fight each other, and the costumes lose. Outdoors, shade is better than direct sun for tulle, which goes flat and shiny in strong light.

After the party

Cold hand wash, hang to dry, accessories back into a labelled bag on the hanger. A gown that is cleaned and hung on the day gets worn for the next year. A gown that sits in a heap for a week becomes a gown that needs replacing.

Dresses people read this one for

Where this sits among the Funna princess dress costumes

These are costumes, not everyday clothes, and the difference is the whole point. A school dress is designed to survive a term; a princess dress for girls is designed to survive a birthday. Knowing which you are buying saves disappointment later, so every card I collected says plainly how the fabric feels, how the sizing runs, and how beautiful it does or does not look once it is on a moving child.

The point of a gown is not the photograph. It is the enchanted half-hour afterwards, when a child explores who else she might be — a queen, a captain, a personality borrowed for the day. Dress-up play of that kind builds imagination faster than anything with batteries, and the pretend kingdom it makes outlasts the dress. Halloween and birthday parties are a bonus; the magical part is an ordinary Wednesday.

There are no ads here and I run the pages myself, so if you cannot find one of the styles you expected, the listing went quiet — nobody paid for the slot. Have fun with it; imagination does the rest.

The five shelves: Princess Dresses for Girls (5) · Mermaid Costumes for Girls (3) · Mommy and Me Costumes (2) · Princess Costumes for Women (4) · Halloween Costumes for Women (9).