Dress Code Cracker: The Colouring Book
Colouring Book, Sarah Innis, dresscodecracker.com, Etsy, $3
Sarah Innis’ colouring book was made as a companion piece to her podcast, Dress Code Cracker, which talks about queer fashion, style and communication. Dress Code Cracker: The Colouring Book includes 10 images of diverse queer style icons alongside vignettes of their advice and thoughts. It also includes a paper doll centre fold (!!). People of colour are well represented within the zine’s pages, as are people of all sizes and across the spectrum of gender identity. Aside from the rad humans represented within the zine’s pages, Innis does a masterful job of capturing text descriptions and quotes from the subjects that communicate their personality and politics. Full disclosure: Sarah Innis is an author and artist I’ve admired for some time, and the colouring book has been re-gifted to my 10-year-old, who is eager to fill in the black and white outlines of everyone’s awesome outfits. This physical zine (in conjunction with the podcast) highlights important conversations around queerness, visibility, personal expression, consumer culture, art and feminism. Colour in Liza Kelly, Toronto theatre designer and fashion genius or Vivek Shraya, artist, author, activist and innovative super human. Appealing to both youth and adults alike, Dress Code Cracker: The Colouring Book makes for a radical, relatable little zine. (CJ Blennerhassett)