The Fashion Coloring Book
By Sharon Lee Tate and Mona Shafer Edwards
Harper & Row, 192 pages, 1984
I have had a copy of The Fashion Coloring Book in the basket of my favourite used-book website, abebooks.com for at least a year, probably two. Still, I didn’t snatch up a copy until a couple of weeks ago when I came across one at a local book sale. I couldn’t have been more pleased
Finally, I could see first-hand what on earth this fashion colouring book was all about. I think my hesitation in buying the book online is that I couldn’t see inside, and couldn’t quite grasp the what and why of such a thing.
It wasn’t at all what I expected, though I’m not sure exactly what that was in the first place. The Fashion Coloring Book is a black-and-white fashion design primer that walks readers through all the basics of line and cut, proportion and colour. It’s not hard to imagine that the book was originally intended simply as a basic design text, and someone at the publishing house then had the colouring book idea after the fact, as it was cheaper to print in black-and-white.
The result is odd, but strangely fascinating. I’m not sure who would go to the trouble of actually colouring in the illustrations, especially since the authors’ dictate precisely which colour is go go where, colour-by-numbers style. If the book had been a collection of ’80s-style illustrations that readers were encouraged to colour in whatever palette they chose, the book would have been fabulously fun. Or if the “colouring book” concept had been dropped altogether, the book would have stood on its own as a fashion design reference. It’s the combination at once confuses and delights me.
But whether discussing the illustrations or the content, The Fashion Coloring Book is very much of its day — that day being 1984. From the silhouettes to the fashion advice (of which there is plenty), the book is ultimately an informative and amusing capsule representing early-80s design.
