Disney Princess Dress Up Trunk Review: A Long-Term Look for Grandparents

I bought the Disney Princess Dress Up Trunk from JAKKS Pacific for my granddaughter Mia's fifth birthday. She is seven now. The trunk has lived in the closet of my spare bedroom for two years, and it has been opened, dumped out, sorted, argued over, re-packed badly, and opened again more times than I can count.

So this is not a review written the week the box arrived. It is the review I wish somebody had handed me in the toy aisle at Target, from a woman with grandchildren, standing there holding a big pink box and wondering whether it was going to be a hit on Saturday or a thing that gets stuffed in a closet by Sunday. Short answer: it was a hit. Longer answer follows, including the parts that annoyed me.

How I've Used It

Mia and her little brother Eli come over most Saturdays. Rachel drops them around ten and picks them up after supper, which means I have the better part of a day to fill. When Mia was four and five, that day got long by about two in the afternoon, so I started letting her put on a show. The trunk became the costume department.

Here is how it actually goes. Mia goes into the grandkids' room and hauls the trunk out by the handle. She dumps everything on the rug because she is looking for one specific skirt. She assembles an outfit that is Aurora on top and Belle on the bottom, which is apparently a creative decision and not a mistake. Then she announces the show, Eli comes running because he hears the word show, and I sit on the sofa and applaud whatever happens next.

She also uses these pieces for her karaoke shows. That machine lives on the toy shelf and she sings into it wearing one of these skirts. The costume is not optional to her. Neither is the tiara, and neither is my full attention, which is the real cost of this product and the best part of it.

One Saturday in February the show ran long. Mia did three acts, which meant three costume changes, which meant the trunk got dumped three separate times. Act one was Aurora. Act two was Cinderella with the Snow White skirt because the blue one was in the wash. Act three was a number she made up on the spot that involved the tiara, a hairbrush for a microphone, and Eli as a dinosaur. I clapped for all three. Eli knocked over the toy shelf during the finale and nobody cried.

Eli is four. He has no interest in the skirts, but he will put the tiara on his head for laughs and then stomp around like a dinosaur wearing it. Sophie is two, my son's girl up in Oklahoma City, and she has not gotten this trunk yet. She will. That is the plan.

What Is Actually in the Box

The set is 21 pieces, sized 4 to 6x, with a Disney Princess theme. You get 4 tops and 3 skirts, mix-and-match, covering Aurora, Belle, Cinderella and Snow White. Then the accessories: 3 bracelets, 3 rings, 1 necklace, 1 choker, 3 headbands, 1 tiara, and a sticker sheet that lets a child put one of four character images on the necklace pendant.

The point of the mix-and-match is not decoration. It is the difference between a costume and a toy. A single Cinderella dress is one thing to wear. Four tops and three skirts is twelve combinations, and a child who is seven and has opinions will find all twelve and rank them.

The JAKKS Pacific set is also lighter than it looks. Mia was five when she started hauling the trunk out of the closet by its handle herself, and she was not a big five. I never once had to carry it for her, which is a small thing that adds up over two years of Saturdays.

The materials are polyester, and the listing describes the fabric as wrinkle resistant, which has mostly held true in my house because the garments spend their lives crammed into a trunk and still come out looking like clothes instead of rags. I have washed these pieces on gentle in cold water and hung them to dry. They have held up. I have not put them in the dryer and I would not.

The trunk itself is a real container with a lid and a handle, and that matters more than you would think. It is the reason this thing has a home instead of ending up as a pile on the floor of my living room.

What Held Up Over Two Years

The tops and skirts are the survivors. Mia was five when she got this and she is seven now, small for her age, and the skirts still fit, though they run a little short on her now. She has worn them for roughly two years of Saturdays and a week each summer, and the seams and the fabric have held. No split seams, no torn hems, no elastic that gave out. Nothing in the JAKKS Pacific set has needed a single repair.

I have washed the four tops and three skirts maybe eight times over those two years, always cold and always gentle, and always hung over the back of a kitchen chair to dry. That is my whole care routine and it has been enough. The one thing I stopped doing was letting a damp piece sit in the trunk overnight, because polyester left wet in a closed box smells like a gym bag by morning. I learned that once and did not repeat it.

The headbands and the tiara also survived, which surprised me because the tiara is the piece that gets thrown, sat on, and fought over. The bracelets and rings are the ones that have thinned out. Small plastic jewelry gets lost. It vanishes into sofas and car seats and the general floor of my house. We are down a couple of bracelets and I could not tell you where the choker went.

The sticker sheet was the first casualty and it went fast. Mia used the stickers within the first month, put one on the necklace pendant, and had a lovely time. If you are the sort of grandparent who hopes an accessory will stay pristine, this one will not. It is a consumable and it was consumed.

What Wore Out or Bugged Me

The sizing is the honest limitation. The set is 4 to 6x, and two years in, Mia is at the top of that range. The skirts still go around her, but they are short, and she has started to notice. If your granddaughter is seven and on the tall side, this may already be too small. If she is small for her age like mine, you have more room than the label suggests.

The choker is the piece I miss most, and it disappeared on a Saturday last spring. We looked under the sofa, inside the cushions, in the car, and in the bottom of the plastic bin. Nothing. It is somewhere in this house and it will turn up when I move the furniture, and when it does I will not have a child small enough to care. That is the life cycle of small plastic jewelry and no set is immune to it.

The jewelry is small and it is a lot of pieces for a parent to keep track of. Twenty-one pieces is twenty-one things that can end up under a radiator. I keep a plastic bin inside the trunk for the small stuff and that has helped, but I will not pretend it solved the problem.

Finally, this is dry-clean-ish in spirit even if the label does not demand it. The fabrics tolerate a cold gentle wash in my house, but they are dress-up clothes, not play clothes for the backyard. If your grandchild is the type to wear a princess skirt into the mud, this is not the set for that, and honestly most sets are not.

The point of the mix-and-match is not decoration. It is the difference between a costume and a toy.

How It Compares to Buying Single Costumes

Before this trunk, I bought Mia one princess dress. It was a fine dress. She wore it hard for about three weeks and then she was done with it, because a single dress is a single idea and she had run out of ideas for it.

I also tried the cheap route first, which was a bag of marked-down costume pieces from a discount bin. The seams let go inside a month and the fabric had the hand of a grocery sack. The trunk runs more than that bag and less than four separate dresses bought one at a time, and it is the one still standing. If you sit down and count what four character costumes would come to separately, the math is not close.

The trunk works differently. Because the tops and skirts separate, she can recut the show every Saturday. Cinderella one week, Aurora the next, Belle with the Snow White skirt for reasons she explained to me at length and I did not fully follow. Two years in and she still finds new combinations, which is why it is still in my closet instead of a donation bin.

The tradeoff is that you get fewer finished, single-character costumes and more parts. Parts get lost. If you want something that looks exactly like a specific princess for one Halloween, buy that one dress. If you want a toy that lasts past Halloween, this is the better buy.

Safety and Practical Details

The packaging lists no warranty, which is worth knowing before you buy. In my experience that has not mattered, because the pieces that failed were the small accessories and I did not expect a company to replace a lost bracelet.

The fabric is polyester, the pieces are costume-grade rather than everyday clothing, and the small jewelry pieces mean this is not a set for a toddler who still puts things in her mouth. Sophie is two and she is getting this trunk from me, but I will hand her the skirts and the headbands and hold the rings back until she is past the mouthing stage. That is my call as her grandmother, not the label's, and you should make yours.

There are no batteries, no charging, no app, no subscription, and nothing that beeps. After a house full of toys that need a phone and a Wi-Fi password, I cannot tell you how much I valued that on the day I bought it.

Who This Is For

This is for the grandparent of a girl roughly three and a half to six who loves to put on a show. If your granddaughter sings, dances, twirls, assigns herself roles, or makes you sit down and watch something, she is the customer for this trunk.

It is also for the grandparent shopping from a distance. My Sophie is three hours away in Oklahoma City and I mail her things between visits. This trunk is flat enough to ship, has no batteries to die before it arrives, needs no setup, and gives a parent something to do with a child on a rainy afternoon. That is a lot of boxes ticked for one purchase.

And it is for the grandparent who wants something to do together. I will be honest with you: the dressing up is hers. My job is to sit on the sofa, take the show seriously, and clap in the right places. But that is a real thing to do together, and it beats another afternoon of the two of us looking at a screen.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if your granddaughter is already seven or eight and tall. The set tops out at 6x and the skirts will be short before you get a full year out of it. Better to look at a bigger size or a different set entirely.

Skip it if you have a toddler who still mouths small objects and no adult around to hold back the rings and bracelets. The small pieces are not a hazard you cannot manage, but they are a hazard you have to manage.

And skip it if you want one perfect Cinderella costume for a specific event. This is a dress-up toy, not a pageant gown. The child who wants to be exactly one princess for one night will be better served by one dress she can pick herself.

One more thing, and then I will let you go. The trunk has been in my closet for two years and I have already decided where it goes next. Sophie will get it when she is a little bigger, and Mia will move on to whatever seven-year-olds move on to, and I will sit on the same sofa and clap for a different girl in the same skirt. That is the whole reason I buy toys like this instead of the ones that blink and quit.