Glue ...
Raises the obvious question: what sort of glue did he use?
And leads to the next question: Hadn't it dried by the time he got to the party?
There's a whole lot to this that I'm just not getting.
Cotton acts as a wick, and both absorbs and fixes solvents. Sticking it to your skin with glue would cause a lot of the solvent that would usually 'boil off' to remain in the cotton.
Do you remember what smokeless powder is/was made of? Cotton, soaked in nitrates: gun-cotton.
The more I think about this, the sicker I feel. He wasn't really that stupid, just ignorant of some basic chemistry and physics.
Hindsight being 20-20, among other disastrous consequences, the situation would have been made much worse because the surface area of all the fiber strands exposed to oxygen. He wouldn't have caught fire, he would have flared like a struck match. It must have been as horrific as unexpected - he would have just exploded into flames. Hot flames, hot enough to ignite things he came into contact with.