Style File: A Visual Vocabluary
of Middle Eastern Dance Costume

Title Style File: A Visual Vocabulary of Middle Eastern Dance Costume

Author Dawn Devine Brown & Barry Brown

ISBN 0-9678170-5-6

Publisher Ibexa Press

Category Nonfiction: Costume Instruction

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

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What It's About

This is a 40-page booklet with about 48 drawings illustrating assorted popular belly dance costume styles, including the nightclub "beads and sequins" look, tribal, Gypsy fantasy, and assorted ethnic/historical looks. It includes some information about the various garments used to achieve each look, and offers definitions of terms such as "baladi dress" that dance newcomers may have heard but don't yet understand. A quick read through this book can prepare a newcomer to the belly dance scene for watching a large, diverse dance festival featuring a wide variety of dance costumes and styles.

Its Good Points

Style File is a nice little booklet that packs a lot of information into its 40 pages. Whether you're a newcomer to belly dance who is fascinated by the wide variety of costume variations worn at various dance events, or whether you're a long-time member of the scene who enjoys adding new resources to your collection, you may enjoy thumbing through it. Since it ventures into some ethnic/historical looks that I haven't myself researched very much, I did learn some new things from it myself. Specific things I liked include:

The booklet contains a large variety of illustrations, showing many assorted costume variations that may serve as inspiration when planning your next outfit.
It defines many garment names that you may have heard people mention but you weren't familiar with. Maybe it will fill in some blanks for you!
It covers each of the major style flavors that is likely to interest dancers: nightclub, Gypsy fusion, tribal, and historic/ethnic.
The drawings did a good job of representing the garments they were meant to illustrate. The picture above showing the book's cover is a valid example of what the drawings inside it look like.
Overall, the book was well organized. Topics seemed to flow in a logical order.

On The Negative Side....

As you might expect, a 40-page booklet can't cover its topic at the same level of detail that a larger volume could. For what it is, it does a nice job, but it may leave you hungry for more. Specific issues that I noted:

It would have been nice if the section of assorted historic and ethnic looks had been 4 or 8 pages longer, to allow more space to show illustrations of garments that the book described but didn't picture.
I found myself wishing for either a table of contents or an index.
Although the drawings were beautifully detailed in their depiction of the garments, the dancers had no faces. I found this a little distracting. In Dawn's defense, it is typical practice for fashion designers to draw figures this way - I'm just not used to it myself.

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

Style File: A Visual Vocabluary of Middle Eastern Dance Costume

What It's About

Its Good Points

On The Negative Side....

Style File: A Visual Vocabluary
of Middle Eastern Dance Costume