Bookcore: Dressing like Book Covers

As we’re nearing the end of June, I wanted to do a quick round-up of my Me Made May project before I forget all about it! After several years of taking part in Me Made May, and wearing me-made pretty much every day anyway, I found it hard to come up with a new challenge for 2022. Somehow I was reminded that earlier in the year I had seen Waterstones had shared some social media posts where they had found book covers to match famous red-carpet-outfits. I thought to myself “wouldn’t it be cool if someone dressed like book covers ON PURPOSE?” thus an idea was born…

I set myself the challenge of dressing like a book every day, one which I didn’t succeed at – unexpectedly changing jobs in the middle of May definitely made things more difficult! It was also much harder than expected to match clothes in my wardrobe with book covers.

I was limited by the book covers I personally could think of, and so I did spend hours scrolling through bookshop websites and bookish social media, but to find books that matched my existing clothes was definitely more difficult than I had expected. It would be an easier exercise if I was deliberately sewing outfits to match book covers (and I am considering that for the future as well) but I don’t need loads of new clothes and that is not in the spirit of Me Made May so I charged ahead with what I had…

My most popular outfit BY FAR was my The Hobbit outfit – and I can see why! I am really pleased with how well this one resembled the cover and captured the spirit of the project. This might be my favourite thing I have ever posted in five years of blogging!

Coming up with the outfits was the hard part, but playing dress up was FUN, I would highly recommend playing around with your wardrobe in a similarly silly way as I pulled together some combinations that I plan to wear again. My Transcendent Kingdom outfit is one of my new favourite combinations. The pink trousers with both green garments was a lovely combo, I love pink and green and will absolutely be wearing this outfit again soon (when it’s a bit cooler!)

I knew I wanted to do a Discovery of Witches outfit as soon as I thought of this project, I had the red tulle in my stash and my husband had the great idea of making it look as if it was floating! Which reminds me I should mention – my husband took all these pictures for me and was so patient with me while I dressed up and explained what I wanted, he had so many great ideas and I am so grateful to him for taking all these pictures for me!

This was the first picture we took to see if the idea actually worked, I didn’t know until I superimposed the book cover onto this image if you’d be able to tell what I was going for. Fortunately I think it worked and the whole project was born. Little secret – I don’t have a red clutch bag so this is actually a piece of a red truck from my son’s bedroom!

I found printed dresses worked really well for the Penguin/Puffin clothbound classics, it was just a case of finding the one that most closely matched. The following dresses are: Sew Liberated Hinterland (dark blue), Style Arc Hope Dress (light blue) and Selkie London dress (purple). These were the quickest and easiest posts to make!

This entirely green outfit is one of my favourites, I added a pink headband to mirror the pink text on the cover and loved that we had the perfect prop in the form of this teeny birdcage. Every little detail was thought of, even if you can’t really tell in the final picture. I am really happy with this outfit and have worn the whole ensemble together again since!

Towards the end, I started to struggle a bit with making the outfits and books match, so I took a bit of creative license and added some graphics to this one. I kind of like it though, it’s fun to play around and as I set the challenge for myself, I get to make the rules!

I don’t want to bore you with every single one so here are the other outfits I managed during May (all the details are on my insta if you want to know more about any of them). Since finishing my project I’ve had some more ideas so I think I am going to keep it going but on a much more casual basis, no pressure – just for fun! Excited to make this a permanent feature of my Instagram, so keep your eyes peeled!

Patterns/outfit details are all on my Instagram if you want more info on the full project.