Fabulously Cheeky

When you want to create your own clothing style, not only do you need to consider what your body type is, but also how long your neck is. The most unflattering, and also the most popular neckline, is the crew neck. I simply can’t understand why so many t-shirts in the stores have crew necks when crew necks add weight to your neck. Nobody wants a hefty neck! Crew necks are just simply frumpy! (We could easily make a frumpy list: crew necks, knee length skirts with flats, baggy t-shirts with tights and tapered pants that are baggy around the hips – I shudder just thinking about it!!!)

Anyway, lets talk about what actually does flatter your neck.

Flattering necklines for long necks:
If your neck is long, you can wear turtle necks as long as the neck on the sweater is at least as long as your neck. If it only comes half way up, like a mock turtle, you are in danger of looking like a turtle. (Sorry, I’ll stop joking). In addition, you look great with a ballet neck, boat neck, cowl neck, wide v-neck, off shoulder necks, and anything that creates some kind of horizontal lines (except crew necks!!!). This will visually shorten a long neck and widen the shoulders to create more harmonious proportions. If someone with a long neck happens to love v-necks, it should be a rounded v (not a sharp v), and you need to break up the neck lengthening effect with lots of necklaces or scarves around your neck. You can also get away with super long ear rings!

Flattering necklines for short necks:
This type of neck needs visual lengthening, so the most flattering necklines are deep v-necks and deep scoops. In addition, you need to accessorize with long necklaces, nothing too close to the neck. If you also have narrow shoulders, you might try deep and wide v-necks instead. Tiny ear rings looks best. Don’t use any scarfs around the neck. If you like scarfs, pick long scarfs that hang down loose, or put a triangular scarf around your shoulders. This will widen the shoulders and still lengthen the neck. Long dusters worn open are also a good option.
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Tags: Body Type, Clothing Style, Create Your Own Clothing Style, How Do I Determine My Body Type

Hopefully, you have figured out what your vertical body type is, so you know if you are long legged, short waisted, or perfectly balanced. If you haven’t, you might want to CLICK HERE.

Determining horizontal body type is easy. Measure around the bust, waist (around the narrowest part) and hips (around the widest part).

If your bust and waist measurements are bigger than your hips, your shape is like an apple.
If your hip measurement is bigger than your bust, your shape is like a pear.
If your bust, waist and hips are fairly equal, your shape is like a rectangle.
If your bust is almost the same size as your hips, and your waist is 7-10″ smaller, give or take a few inches, your shape is like an hourglass.

Dressing an apple
Promise me to NEVER, EVER wear a big, loose, boxy t-shirt over tights or skinny pants!!! For some very strange reason, women with this type of figure love this combination, but unfortunately, tights and a loose, baggy t-shirt looks way too boxy and actually accentuates your proportions in the wrong way. I know it is tempting, because this type of figure often has skinny legs, but skinny legs and a heavy top can easily look top heavy. So forget leggings and skinny pants. What you need to do is to add fullness to the hips while minimizing the bust.
The best way to do this is by using dark colored tops in crisp, somewhat fitted fabrics. NO BAGGY T-SHIRTS! Also, stay away from short sleeves, which add weight to your bust. Long or 3/4 sleeves are more flattering.
Pants should be light colored (since light colors will add fullness), with straight or wide legs (NO TAPERED LEGS). This will make your body look more proportionate.

Dressing a pear:
When dressing a pear, we want to minimize the hips, and add fullness to the bust. For some odd reason, women with this kind of body shape love wearing pants that are baggy around the hips and tapered on the bottom. TERRIBLE! I call these “frumpy mommy pants!” This will only make your hips look bigger and more disproportionate! What you need is nicely fitted pants with straight or wide legs in a dark color. Dark colored pants are a must for this type of figure. If you love jeans, get the darkest color you can find, and make sure they fit snugly around the hips.
To add fullness to the bust, think bright or light colors, patterns, horizontal stripes at the top (not at the hips), shoulder pads and short sleeves. The goal is to try to even out the proportions so that the hips and shoulders look more equal.

Dressing a rectangle:
Here, the main purpose is to divert attention away from the waist line. The easiest way to do this is use the same color on top as on the bottom, preferably a dark color. Avoid belts or pockets in this area. Use long scarfs that create strong vertical lines. Try tops with princess seams or baby doll styles that don’t cling.

Dressing an hourglass:
The more extreme the hourglass shape is, the more tailored and fitted the clothing has to be. Baggy clothing doesn’t fit this type of figure at all. If your waist line is tiny, you can wear narrow belts to show it off. If your proportions are balanced, you can even get away with tights and skinny pants if you wish. This type of body can get away with wearing a bit more extreme fashions than the other types.
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Tags: Body Type, Clothing Style, Create Your Own Clothing Style, How Do I Determine My Body Type

Once you know your vertical body type, it is easy to determine the best length for your tops.

Long legs + short torso:
For this body type to look balanced, you need to visually shorten the legs and lengthen the torso. Low waisted pants are good for this, and also long tops. The most flattering length is somewhere near your hip socket. Being 5’8″ with very long legs, my most flattering top length is 24-25″. 23″ is a bit on the short side, and 27″ looks disproportionate the other way. If I wear anything shorter than 23″, I look way taller than I actually am. The other trick to visually lengthen your torso is by using long necklaces, long scarfs hanging down, and low slung belts (no waist belts, unless the belt is the same color as your top). You can also layer the look with a long t-shirt and a shorter jacket. But normally, jackets look best if they are quite long.

Balanced legs and torso:
If you have a balanced body type where legs and torso are equal length, you have to stay away from any extremes. Pants should be mid rise, and tops should be a few inches longer than the top of your hip bone. No cropped tops, cropped pants or long tops. The proportions are already correct and should not be visually changed.

Short legs and long torso:
If you have short legs and a long torso, high rise pants, or pants that go to your natural waist, are more flattering. Pinstripes visually lengthens the legs. The torso should be visually shortened with cropped tops and jackets and tucked in t-shirts. Belts around the waist look great if your body is slim. Avoid long hanging scarfs and long necklaces. A pretty pin would be a better choice. Long skirts are also a good way to visually lengthen short legs. Even though I hate high heels with a passion, moderate heels are not a bad option for this body type, since it also helps even out the proportions.

Clue: If you always find yourself pulling or tugging on your top, you need longer tops. Pay attention to where you like to pull it down to – that is usually where your best length is. Likewise, if you are always blousing your top upwards, see where you usually push it to, and buy tops that have that specific length.

Short waisted:
If you measure your hip to bust and find that you are short waisted, you have to always try to lengthen this part. Baby doll type empire tops may look great, and also vertical stripes. Definitely no horizontal stripes, and no waist belts. Fitted tops and princess seams are another good way to lengthen your midbody. And don’t even think about using cropped tops. Longer tops look better, as long as they don’t shorten the legs too much. Check in the mirror to see where the length of the top looks just right.

Now, when I buy cloting on ebay, I don’t even look at clothing that has the wrong length. What is the point? It just makes me look dis-proportionate if the length is wrong. Recently, I just hit my 50th birthday, and since I believe that a girl needs a major makeover every time she hits another decade (and probably in between as well), I threw out all the tops that were too short, and went wild on ebay, looking for longer tops. Finally, my wardrobe really works, and I am very happy. It is fun to create your own clothing style.
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Tags: Body Type, Clothing Style, Create Your Own Clothing Style, How Do I Determine My Body Type, makeover

Because dressing well is all about balancing proportions, you need to know what your vertical body type is before you can tell what clothing is more flattering. The best way to determine your body is to take out your measuring tape again.

In the last post, I talked about how you can measure your leg length, subtract it from your total height, so you can determine if your legs are longer, shorter or equal to your torso length. In addition, you also need to know if you are short or long waisted. To find out how you measure up, start with your leg length first. Measure from the floor to where your legs enter your hip socket. Then, measure from the hip socket to the tip of your bust.

To figure out what your proportions are, first subtract the leg length from your total length. Compare this number with your torso length so you can determine if your legs are long, equal or shorter than your torso.

Then subtract your hip to bust measurement from your torso length. Ideally, hip to bust and bust to top of head are supposed to be equal. If hip to bust is longer, you are long waisted. If hip to bust is shorter, you are short waisted.

Now, write down what your vertical body type is. Here are some possibilities:

Totally balanced: leg length = torso length
Longer Legs: legs are longer than torso
Shorter Legs: legs are shorter than torso
And in addition, you also need to consider whether you are long waisted, short waisted, or if your waist has a normal length.

When buying clothes, the most flattering clothes are the ones that balance out these proportions. Once you know what they are, it is easy to figure out what length top or skirt to buy. More about the length of tops tomorrow.
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Tags: Body Type, Clothing Style, Create Your Own Clothing Style, How Do I Determine My Body Type

Almost nobody has a perfect body, but that’s ok. Instead of trying to be something we can’t be, we have to learn to work with what we have been given. It is all about creating balance visually, by using the right kind of clothes in the right colors.

I recently read a book that I found very helpful called “Staging Your Comeback” by Christopher Hopkins. He is focusing on how women over 45 can create their own clothing style. Although, I don’t agree with his makeup philosophy, he had some very good ideas about clothing style.

One of the most eye opening things I found out about myself was that my legs were actually 4″ longer than my torso!!! I knew they were long, but I didn’t have a clue they were that long. So, if you want to know what clothes to wear, this is the first thing you have to know.

Measure with a stiff tape measure from the floor up to exactly where the leg enters the hip joint. Then subtract this measurement from your total heigth. The most balanced proportions are when torso and leg length are the same. If that is the case, you look best in long pants with a mid rise – not too high, not too low.

If your legs are longer than your torso, you can wear low rise pants, cropped pants and capris, and of course long pants. Stay away from pinstripes, which tends to create a lengthening effect.

If you have shorter legs than torso, you need pants that come all the way to your waist. Stay away from cropped and capris. Pinstripes are your friend.

When it comes to skirt lengths, you first have to decide what kinds of shoes you are willing to wear. If you love comfortable flats, long skirts or mid leg length is more flattering. If you are willing to wear heels, you can get away with above or below the knee, but don’t even think about wearing flats with a knee length skirt. Flats with knee length are frumpy!

The problem with knee length skirts is that they cut your legs in half. This makes your legs look shorter, so you have to balance the visual shortening with high heels. If you wear long skirts, your legs look fine as they are, so flats are not a problem.

When it comes to mini skirts, you really shouldn’t wear them, unless you are under 30 (or maybe 40…) But, if you do love them, and you have the legs to carry them off, there are two ways to wear them. If you wear your mini with bare legs, the skirt visually shortens your legs, so you need to wear high heels to balance the shortening effect. If you wear your mini with opaque tights in the same color as the skirt, preferably black, you can get away with wearing black, flat boots, since wearing all the same color visually lengthens the legs.

My main priority, when picking a skirt length, has to do with the comfort of my feet, so personally, I prefer to stay with long skirts and flats. Remember, long skirts create long slim lines, and the best thing is, you can wear them with shoes that don’t ruin your feet or damage your back, and it still looks good. A long skirt or long pants with flats is the only style that doesn’t compromise your style, or your comfort. That’s why I love it.
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Tags: Clothing Style, Create Your Own Clothing Style

It is time we rebel against all nonsense, especially when it comes to fixed beauty concepts and fashions. Every year, runway models show off the newest fashions – fashions that are made to look good on them. These models are about 6′ tall and most weigh less than 120 lbs. Would you really want to look like them, honestly? The last time I saw catwalk pictures on MSN, I looked at the pictures, long and hard, and my conclusion was that the poor models looked like they had been starved for months and months before they were allowed to walk down that runway. That kind of skinniness didn’t look healthy, or natural, at least not to me. And these are the people extreme fashion is made to look good on!

Are these our ideals? I don’t think they should be! Women are supposed to be round and soft. We are supposed to have babies and nurture those babies. Tight, skinny bodies with no curves aren’t as soft and nurturing as someone with a few extra pounds here and there. We have to create our own ideas of what is beautiful – and it should be based on how nature has made us. We need to celebrate our differences, rather than trying to fit into a standard of beauty that doesn’t fit any of us.

So, we need a new approach. We need to start defining our own standards of beauty by discovering and celebrating each individual’s own beauty! We have to stop comparing ourselves to anyone else, and we have to stop criticizing ourselves. We are all different from each other, we are all beautiful in our own ways, so let’s celebrate our differences instead of trying to be all the same.

First of all, we need to work with the bodies that we have. We shouldn’t have to cut and suck, stitch and tuck so that we can all have the same bodies in the end. All we have to do is think how we can balance out what we have been given. This can easily happen with clothing. Because we all have different body shapes, each of us have to also develop our own individual clothing style.

Both the shape and the color of the clothes we choose can make a huge difference when it comes to balancing out the features we have been given. In the next week or so, I am going to write a series of posts about how we can create our own individually flattering clothing style.
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Tags: Beautiful, Beauty, rebel

It wasn’t just in the old days that fashions were extreme. In our days, plastic surgery is big business because nobody feels beautiful just the way they are.

I first experienced, second hand, the curse of plastic surgery when one of my girl friends decided to get breast implants. She had a beautiful, petite body, but after she nursed a baby, her breasts were never quite the same, and she wasn’t happy. She told me that men like big breasts, so she was getting implants.

The surgery was extremely painful, with big scars under each breast, but she was so excited about her beautiful round new breasts that she showed them to anyone who wanted to see them. A year or two went by, and somehow, she started having a reaction to the implants. Her breasts turned as hard as stones and became extremely uncomfortable.

She went back to the doc, who suggested to have them removed. So, again she had to have surgery, and after taking the implants out, the doc had to try to reshape her old breasts by doing a bit of tucking and stitching. Poor girly – she really went through a lot.

Another example I remember was when I took all the clothes I had designed to a photographer to get my portfolio done. She had picked a model who was so pretty that I felt like Cinderella next to her. She was the most perfect person I had ever seen – absolutely gorgeous -until she did something that I’ll never forget!

All of a sudden, the photographer asked her to lift her breasts a little, so the dress would hang better. The model lifted her breasts, and they stayed in that new place!!! I couldn’t believe my eyes and said “How is that possible???” Silicone implants! I should have guessed. Hers were starting to get hard, as well, so she was actually able to position her breasts up/down/right/left so the pictures would come out better.

Oh, my God! I can’t believe that someone so pretty could even consider improving her looks! But it only shows one thing – nobody is happy with the way they look – it doesn’t matter how gorgeous they are!

The time has finally come to question all this nonsense and draw the line. It is time we start celebrating who we are. It is time we learn how to appreciate our own, unique beauty. It is time we get together with our girlfriends, not to criticize, but to encourage and help each other find our best assets. We must learn to enhance these, and stop obsessing about what we don’t have, or what we have, but don’t want. Enough is enough!
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Tags: Beautiful, Beauty

Here is another example of stupidity in the name of fashion and beauty. 20″ waistline, anyone? Those poor girls couldn’t even dress themselves because they had to be tied into a corset that was so tight that it squeezed all their organs down to the lower end of the stomach area and made it almost impossible to breathe. No wonder they kept fainting in those days!

And, to make the tiny waistlines even more pronounced, they made skirts so big that they had to wear them over some kind of stiff cage made from whalebones or some such thing. The poor girls had to learn how to sit in such a way that their walebone cage wouldn’t spring up and hit them in the face (and expose their underwear, god forbid!) Legs had to be hidden at all costs, while breasts would be squeezed and pushed together until it looked like they were going to burst over the top of the dress. Talk about cleavage! But, no, bare legs were more indecent than bulging breasts!

This, of course, sounds like another idea created by men. By making women focus on hiding their legs and not their breasts, they got to enjoy their breasts in public!

My mother just told me that one of the Danish queens at the beginning of the last century actually had two of her ribs removed on each side so that she could make her waist line even smaller. Ribs removed??? It seems that fashion and insanity always go hand in hand!

Again, we see the patterns. Small waistlines are beautiful. Then, the tendency became to make them smaller and smaller with the use of killer corsets. In the end, the obsession with tiny waistlines became so extreme that they started using surgery to create the impossible. Then someone started realizing how ridiculous it was, the fad died and fashions went in the opposite direction. By 1920, the women wore shapeless tube dresses which flattened their chests and didn’t show any waistlines whatsoever. Again, it went from one extreme to another…
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Tags: Beauty, Fashion

In my younger days, I studied fashion design. Since I was born hopelessly vain, fashion was fun, interesting and a big part of my life. I dreamed about making my own clothing lines, which I actually did, too, for many years.

One of the things I enjoyed the most was the fashion history classes we had to attend. There was one interesting pattern that went through the all the different periods, and that was the fact that fashion always starts as an idea. Then people want to push it more and more, until the whole concept becomes ridiculous, and then the fad dies. There are many examples:

In medieval times, shoes with a long tip were “in,” like the ones you see the joker wear. Then, people started out-doing each other, demanding longer and longer tips on their shoes, until they started tripping on the stupid things. Eventually, someone came up with the fantastic idea of tying the tip of the shoe to the leg so they wouldn’t trip. After a while, people finally realized that it made them look like clowns, and the fad died.

At some point, men were even wearing cod pieces to make their penises look bigger. (Whoever came up with that idea??? It certainly couldn’t have been a girl!) Maybe this was caused by the lack of available viagra in those days. How dum! Now men can no longer hide behind cod pieces, but they still worry if they can measure up. Maybe it’s a universal guy thing! If only they could realize that men worry more about penis size then women do. So, who are they trying to impress, anyway??? The women I know don’t care about size!

Maybe it is simply human nature to never be happy with what we are given. We want one part a little bigger, another part a little smaller, some bits a little higher, and so on, and so forth. I am hoping that some day, we’ll be able to just be happy about what we have been given. Nature is nature, why change it if it works?
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Tags: Fashion