Confusing Costume by Cora Lee

Review by Maxx

Confusing Costume is as colorful and exciting as a trip to the Goodwill bins in SODO: it’s fascinatingly weird, deliberately confusing, and has a little something for everyone. Part feminist propaganda, part autobiographical scrapbook journal slash fashion look book, its stated goal is: “Let’s liberate fashion!”

What I like best about Confusing Costume is that it outlines the way the author has come to understand fashion, and invites the reader to invent their own looks as one’s own unique form of self expression. Unlike the world of mainstream capitalist fashion that tries to make everyone look the same by spending money you don’t have on disposable factory-made garbage, Cora Lee paints a picture of fashion that is collaborative, fun, and, well, liberating!

One of my favorite concepts from the book is that the dress-up play we engaged in as children should be our approach to getting dressed as adults. We should aim to arrange outfits that please ourselves aesthetically and emotionally, as a way to externalize the complexity and beauty of our souls.

While most of the zine is a fashion manifesto, there is also a “Coloring Pages” segment featuring the artist’s rad fashion illustration, as well as a sweet mixtape in the back! It also has a really fiery section that beseeches men to wear skirts as a way to break down the gender binary that reads like a recipe from the anarchist cookbook.

If you’d like a taste of what the book is like, go ahead and follow @butterbeanbun before coming by to check out Lee’s entire oeuvre in our shop!

---