Costuming From The Hip

Title Costuming From The Hip

Author Dawn Devine Brown & Barry Brown

ISBN 0967817005

Publisher Dawn Devine Brown

Category Nonfiction: Costume Instruction

Shira's Rating (On a scale of 0 to 5)

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What It's About

This 110-page book is primarily intended for someone who is brand-new to creating belly dancing costumes, and needs ideas on where to start. It describes the basic clothing items that might be used in a dance costume, and talks about how to assemble them into a completed ensemble. Extensively illustrated, it includes diagrams that will help you draft your own patterns for blouses, vests, pants, caftans, and more. Costume styles included are both the "nightclub" look and the more covered historical look.

In addition to describing the basic costume components, the book provides further valuable information. I'm sure many dancers appreciate the chapter about various body features such as short neck, small or large bust, full upper arms, short or tall frame, wide or narrow hips, etc. and how to design costumes that make them look their best.

Although the overall book caters to women, there is a special chapter on costuming for male dancers that may prove helpful to this often-ignored minority group. It talks about shirts, vests, hip accents, pants, and head coverings especially suitable for men.

Its Good Points

The book doesn't focus solely on "how to make a costume". Although it does include excellent information on that topic, it also contains advice on how to choose a costume design that will look best with your figure type, as well as chapters on how to become a professional costume designer and how to care for the completed costume. A 6-page bibliography suggests additional books that may be valuable.

For me, the strongest characteristic of this book was the fact that it was liberally illustrated. Many drawings of dancers in costume clarified what the text was describing, and provided inspiration for ways to assemble the various components into a final ensemble. The abundant supply of diagrams showing how to draft patterns for the various costume items should prove very helpful to people who are proficient at sewing.

Readers who will benefit the most from this book are people who are already comfortable with a sewing machine, but new to the world of making belly dancing costumes. But dancers who break out in a rash at the sight of a sewing machine will still find the book helpful as a guide to choosing ready-made costume items or knowing what to ask for when commissioning a custom-made one.

Even experienced costume makers will probably learn something new from this book. For certain garments, such as the Turkish coat, the book provides historical background.

On The Negative Side....

While some sections of the book were very detailed, it would have been nice to see others expanded. For example, the section on decorating the bra was general, and that's an area that could have benefited from either including more specific details.

The book does not contain any information about sewing techniques--it assumes the reader will get that information from somewhere else. While this is generally a reasonable assumption, I would have liked to see a chapter on how to deal with the specific sewing challenges posed by the exotic fabrics we use in belly dance costuming: sequin fabric, delicate chiffon, foils, tissue lamé, etc. Although I am very experienced at sewing (used to make all my own clothes in high school, and have made my own tailored suits), I discovered that belly dance fabrics often require special techniques such as using needle lubricant. It would have been nice if this book had offered solutions to some of those issues unique to working with such specialty fabrics.

The spiral binding, although keeping the book in an affordable price range, makes it inconvenient to store on the bookshelf, especially if that shelf is holding several additional spiral-bound books. However, the spiral binding makes it easy to keep the book open to a certain page for reference when actually working on a costume, so it isn't all bad!

As you can see from the fact that I gave this book four stars on a scale of one to five, I obviously felt that strong points of the book greatly outweighed these issues. I definitely recommend it.

To contact the author:

Dawn Devine Brown
P.O. Box 221
Roseville, CA 95678-1312

Email: davina@davina.org
Web Site: http://www.davina.org