Sequins for Shame?

#01

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Details

Format: Print Publication
Pages: 196
Size: 152.4 × 190.5 mm
Role: Sole Designer
Year: 2026

Responsibilities

Editorial Design & Layout
Typography & Grid Systems
Research
Image Selection
Risograph Printing
Coptic Binding
Print Production

Sequins for Shame? is a research‑driven book that uses cabaret costume to examine power, labour, and moral judgment across Weimar Berlin, Parisian revues, postcolonial India, and their afterlives in film and fashion. Drawing on archival images, film stills (Der blaue Engel, Cabaret, Moulin Rouge!, India Cabaret), and secondary scholarship, the project treats garments, posters, and nightclub interiors as evidence rather than decoration.

The book is structured through four lenses that are Money, Empire, Body, and Silence to explore cabaret across Weimar Germany, Paris, and India, from hyperinflation costumes and raid imagery to cancan choreography and Bombay dancers’ interviews. A final chapter connects this research to Jean Paul Gaultier’s SS14 Butterfly collection and Fashion Freak Show, showing how contemporary fashion re-stages cabaret as branded spectacle while continuing to raise questions of gaze, gender, and power.

Visually, the book is colour‑coded (black for Berlin, red for Paris, pink/green for India) and combines radical one‑line texts with captions and a Risograph printed film section to track cabaret’s journey from club to cinema to runway.