The Costume Goddess Tells All:
Flattering Costume for Bellydancers

Title	The Costume Goddess Tells All, Volume 1: Flattering Costume for Bellydancers
Author	Dina Lydia
ISBN	None
Publisher	Dina Lydia & Blair Johnson
Category	Nonfiction: Costume Instruction
Shira's Rating	(On a scale of 0 to 5)

What It's About

This is Volume 1 in a series of books about belly dance costuming written by Dina Lydia, The Costume Goddess. It provides a starting point on how to choose a flattering belly dance costume design. It talks about the different styles of costuming such as tribal, folkloric, Gypsy, and others, with comments to differentiate between them, then goes on to provide advice on how to design a costume that will work well with your particular figure type.

Flattering Costume begins with an introduction to the general concept of belly dance costuming, with a tour of the various styles of costumes that are popular with belly dancers. From there it discusses the various individual garments that are part of each. It also addresses the basic elements of color, fabric, and trims.

My favorite section of the book focuses on how to choose costume designs that look good for various figure types: tall vs short, plus-sized versus thin, etc. Whether you are slender and petite, queen-sized, or somewhere in between, this book probably contains some useful tips for your figure type. These are structured in the form of do's and don't's. This section talks about how to emphasize your good features while drawing attention away from others.

The book is extensively illustrated with Dina's artwork, and also includes some photographs of dancers in costume.

Dina's writing style is very playful and direct. I found it fun to read and often smiled at how she expressed things, but it's not for everybody. I've heard other people complain about her straight talk when describing their particular figure type, so if you're particularly sensitive about some of your body issues, you might not care for it. I didn't mind because she picks on everybody equally: she makes comments about short dancers as "standing in a hole", and tall dancers as "legs look a mile long". She warns thin dancers of the risk of looking "bony or scrawny" and ample ones of looking as though they have "hundreds of square inches of flesh" and then goes on to discuss how to avoid these effects.

Dina is also very opinionated, and you may disagree with some of her pronouncements. In the section titled, "Costumes That Suck" she identifies several costume designs that she feels wouldn't look good on any body type. Some of the items discussed in this section are things I've seen on many dancers, so I suspect some people will take issue with some of her opinions here.

The book does not provide instructions for drafting patterns for specific garments, and it does not provide sewing instructions. Dina has produced other books which address specific how-to's. This book is focused exclusively on how to combine different types of costume pieces in different colors, styles, and fabrics to create a look that is flattering.

Its Good Points

This book provides a good introduction for new dancers to the many belly dance costuming options that are available out there, and offers many good ideas for creating your own unique costume design. The section titled "Bellydance Costume Pieces" describes a wide variety of hip belts, tops, skirt styles, dresses, and pantaloons to inspire costume designers of all skill levels, from the newest student to the most experienced professional.

The entire book is beautifully illustrated with many detailed drawings. All the drawings provide a useful function of helping clarify whatever the text is explaining. Since the drawings are all done by the same artist, they have a consistent look and feel throughout the book.

The ideas and advice that this book offers for a wide variety of figure types should help people choose costume styles that look flattering on their unique body types.

The text is well-written. It is easy to read, and explains its points well. I found the humorous approach to be entertaining.

On The Negative Side....

There is some very good advice in the sections titled, "Larger Ladies and Bellydance" and "The Plump Dancer", but these sections would have been stronger if they had been illustrated with photos of a couple of plus-sized dancers who had made good costume decisions. The text definitely has good material, it just would have been nice to support it with photos.

All photos in the book were of slender and medium-sized models - there were no photos of plus-sized dancers. It would have been nice to have more diversity in body types.

Like many other belly dancing books, this one is bound with plastic spiral binding. Although this binding does help keep the cost of the book down, it takes more space on my bookshelf than other binding types and it's hard for me to tell which book is which when I'm looking at the spines of several spiral-bound books side-by-side.

To contact the author:

Dina Lydia
P.O. Box 30878
Seattle,WA 98103-0878

Email: dina@costumegoddess.com
Web Site: http://www.costumegoddess.com/

Reviews of Other Books by the Same Author

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