Dressing Your Unique Body Signature
“The dress must follow the body of a woman, not the body following the shape of the dress.””
I’ve never met Hubert, but he and I are on the same page when it comes to dresses. For years I tried to fit myself into “the dress” and when it didn’t work out so pretty I beat myself up — what was wrong with me? My hips were too wide, my chest too flat, my tummy too full…if I could just lose 10 lbs then the dress would do it’s magic on me the same way it had on that woman in the catalogue.
But now I’m older and wiser and I know exactly what the problem is — it’s not me, it’s the dress!!
For decades, fashion designers and clothing retailers have worked hard to get us to fall in love with the dress and to hate our bodies for not fitting into it. But instead we need to learn to fall in love with our body and dismiss any dress that doesn’t flatter it.
Each of us is born with a unique body signature that changes over time as we journey through life. What we feed it and how we nurture it and work it plays a small role in some of the changes that occur over time — but much of what we have is fixed. Our skeleton comes with a particular shape and height and scale. Whether your bones are wider on top or the bottom or perfectly aligned is what determines your body’s shape. How long the bones in your legs, torso, and neck determines your height. How large your bones determines your scale. Whether your shoulders slope or your ribcage protrudes or your breast bone indents or your fingers are long or stubby is totally out of your control. But all of it is what contributes to a body signature as unique to you as your fingerprint.
Perhaps, like me, you’ve wasted way too much energy wishing that you’d come in a different package - but whether you took time to realize it or not, you received the package you needed to carry out your purpose in the world. Your unique body signature uniquely supports the soul that lives within it.
Of course this doesn’t make it any easier in the fitting room when everything seems manufactured for a completely different body signature to yours. But maybe that’s just a signal that fast fashion no longer serves you well. Or maybe you’ve been so busy shopping for the body of your fantasies that you’ve lost the ability to see clothes that are actually better designed for your body.
Take a moment to draw your body on paper (stand naked in front of the mirror so you don’t miss anything). Next put a gold star next to the parts of you that you actually love — your slim ankles, your long fingers, your curvaceous hips. And then draw an arrow toward any parts you don’t love — your flat butt or your flabby upper arms or your large breasts. Do you know how to dress yourself to emphasize the things you love and de-emphasize the parts you don’t? And what about your vertical and horizontal lines? Are they balanced? Do you want to emphasize any asymmetry you see or would you prefer to create a more visually balanced look? Some women love to emphasize their curves and others prefer to hide them. Some women love their petite stature and others want to appear taller. There is no right or wrong answer and doing it one way today doesn’t preclude you de-emphasizing something else tomorrow. The goal of this exercise is to help you to learn the elements that go into ‘dressing your unique body signature’. Because once you know how you want your clothes to support you, it makes it easier to find the styles that work for you. But what if you know what you want your clothes to do for you, but you don’t know how to achieve it? Well, book a Discovery session and let me help you determine and dress your unique body signature!
P.S. The Style Club is opening up for enrollment September 30, 2021 — you can sign up here