Skip to content
Dress-up, sized and written down — one shelf at a time
Funna
Wardrobe / Guides / Washing and Storing a Costume

Washing and Storing a Costume

How to wash tulle, satin and mesh costumes without wrecking them, and how to store them between parties Part of the Funna wardrobe of princess dress costumes.

Costume fabrics are not difficult, but they are unforgiving of the one thing people reach for first, which is heat. Almost every failure I have seen — a flattened skirt, a melted hem, a wig that will not comb out — comes down to a hot wash, a hot dryer or a hot iron.

Washing

Cold water and hand washing, every time. Funna's own care instruction on the girls' dresses is hand wash in cold water, line dry, and it is the right one. Use a mild detergent, no bleach, no fabric softener — softener coats tulle and takes the stiffness out of the skirt permanently. If a dress must go in a machine, put it in a mesh laundry bag on the coldest, gentlest cycle, and accept that the rhinestones are now a lottery.

Drying

Never a tumble dryer. Hang the dress from the shoulders on a padded hanger and let the skirt fall. Tulle dries in a couple of hours. Satin takes longer and will hold any crease it dries into, so shake it out before hanging and again halfway through.

Creases

Do not iron tulle. If a skirt comes out of storage flat, hang it in a steamy bathroom for twenty minutes and shake it; the layers recover on their own. Satin bodices can take a cool iron on the reverse, through a cloth, away from any applied decoration.

Wigs

Comb from the ends upwards with a wide-tooth comb, never a brush. Keep the fibre away from hairdryers, ovens and radiators — most costume wig fibre softens at temperatures a kitchen reaches easily. Store a wig on a shelf or a stand rather than squashed in a drawer, and it will keep its curl from one October to the next.

Storage between parties

Hang, do not fold. A gown folded in a box for eleven months comes out with permanent lines across the skirt. If there is no hanging space, fold once at the waist over a padded hanger bar and stuff the bodice lightly with tissue so it keeps its shape. Keep accessories in a labelled bag pinned to the hanger — the hat is always the piece that goes missing, and it is always the piece the costume least survives without.

Dresses people read this one for

Where this sits among the Funna princess dress costumes

The wardrobe is small on purpose. I would rather keep two dozen Funna princess dress costumes for girls properly described than list two hundred and let them rot. Each was collected, read against its own listing and designed to be understood in a minute, including how the hem runs and how the lining feels against the everyday clothes worn underneath. If a dress stops being worth its money it leaves the shelf, however beautiful it looks in the photograph, and whatever the birthday calendar says.

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.

No ads run on these pages and nobody pays to sit near the top, so when one of the styles disappears it is because the listing did. Find the size first, have fun with the rest, and let imagination do the heavy lifting.

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).