So you keep seeing these cute chic outfits on social media and Pinterest. But when you try to recreate them on yourself, they don’t look as good. So you end up saving a bunch of inspirational images, not knowing what to do with them. And then eventually you give up and you return to your normal style. If this sounds like you, you’re not alone. And I’m here to tell you that there is nothing wrong with you. The issue here is that the outfits and inspiration that you’re looking at doesn’t really work for your body shape. I’m going to teach you my method of how to recreate any outfit that’s out there to make it work for your body shape and proportions. And as always. We’re going to do an outfit recreation together, and I’m going to walk you through it step by step for each body type. And even if we’re doing a body shape that is not yours, some information might still be relevant.
Figure out your dressing goals
. So let’s get it started. My name is May and this is elegance. So the process that we will be working with today is called the frame method. And Frame is an acronym that I came up with just to make it easier for you to follow through the steps and actually transform an outfit that you like into something that you can wear for your body shape. So let me give you a rundown of the acronym first. F stands for
figure out your dressing goals. R recognize what works. A adjust what doesn’t match the inspiration. And E enhance with accessories. Okay, starting off with the first one the F in frame. Figure out your dressing goals.
And what I mean by this is if you want to make an outfit work for your body shape, you need to first know what your body shape is and then know what to do with that information. Because with each body shape, there is one main goal, one main focus area that you need to be aware of.
Body shape types
And there are five body shapes for women. I’m sure a lot of you are familiar with that. Some of us may not fit into one category 100%, and that’s totally normal. That’s totally fine. But generally speaking, these categories give us a pretty good direction into what we should focus on and what our body shape is generally is. Another thing to mention here is body shapes have nothing to do with your weight or size.
They’re all about your proportions. For example, a lot of people think that an hourglass shape has to be slightly curvy, kind of like a Kim Kardashian type of shape. But that’s actually not true, because you can be an hourglass and slim, or an hourglass and plus size, because the proportions are what determines the body shape and not the weight. The same way that you can be an apple shape and slim at the same time, even though that’s less common and less noticeable. But it’s possible because some bodies store their fat and weight in their stomach area, and that’s what creates the apple shape.
So remember, proportions are superior. All right. Now let’s go over the five main body shapes. And I’m going to give you a quick rundown. And then I’m going to teach you how to figure out your body shape. Starting off with apple shape, some people call it round or circle. It’s all the same thing. An apple body shape is typically rounder through the middle.
The shoulders and bust are broader than the hips. The waist is not defined and the midsection is typically very full and rounded. So the dress and goal for an apple shape is to create balance and structure throughout the body and draw attention to other parts of the body rather than the midsection. And that is the first step. Remember, that’s the F in frame. Figure out your body goal.
Next up we have the pear shape. Some people call it triangle. Again it’s the same thing and pear shaped bodies are bottom heavy. The hips are wider than the shoulders which creates that triangle shape. The waist can be more defined than an apple shape, but sometimes it’s not super defined.
Shape Maintain
And that’s okay. So the goal with the pear shape is to balance out the hips. So you need to bring attention to your upper body, to your shoulders to create that balance. So that is your F in frame. That is your dressing code. Next up we have hourglass which is defined at the waist.
The hips and the shoulders are roughly equal. So the overall body looks balanced and the waist is defined. The dressing goal for an hourglass shape is to emphasize the waist and maintain that balance.
Next we have the rectangle shape, which is kind of similar to hourglass, with one exception, which is the waist is not defined, so the shoulders, waist, and hips are all of similar or equal width, which creates a rectangle kind of a straight look,
which means that the dressing goal for a rectangle body shape is to create the illusion of curves and emphasize the waist.
And lastly, we have the inverted triangle shape. This one is top heavy, which means the shoulders are broader than the hips.
Dressing Goal
The waist may or may not be defined, and the dressing goal is exactly the exactly the opposite of pear shape. So here we want to balance out the shoulders by bringing attention to the lower body area and the hips. Okay, if you have never done this before, here is an easy way to determine your body shape.
I want you to wear very fitted garments so that could be a fitted tank top with leggings. Or you can just do your undergarments. And I want you to stand in front of a full length mirror. If you don’t have a full length mirror, what you can do is just stand against the wall and have your phone on a tripod or somewhere high that you can take pictures of yourself and you can see your full body. And once you do that.
you’re going to look at each part of your body. But make sure you don’t hold your breath. You don’t make yourself look taller.
This is just for you. To give you an idea of what your body shape is. So when you’re looking at yourself in the mirror, it will either be obvious what your body shape is. If it’s not obvious, or if you want to be more accurate, you can You can measure yourself. So get a measuring tape and wrap it around your shoulders, your bust, your waist and your hips. And then in the next step we’re going to compare those measurements. We want to compare the smallest and largest numbers because this will help us determine your proportions.
So here is a simple guide to pinpoint what your shape is. If your shoulders and busts are larger than your hips, then you are an inverted triangle. If your hips are bigger than your shoulders or bust, then you are a pear shape.
If your shoulders are roughly similar to your bust and hips with a defined waist,hen you are an hourglass. If all measurements are roughly equal with very little waist definition, then you are a rectangle.
Apple shape
And if you have a larger waist compared to your bust and hips, then you are an apple shape. Also, I want you to know that every body shape has its pros and cons, and that’s totally normal. We’re humans at the end of the day, so I don’t want you to look at your body shape or think of it in a judgmental way.
We’re not We’re not here to judge anything. We’re very neutral. It’s not good or bad. It’s just is. And I want you to take this as an opportunity for you to improve your dressing, to improve your relationship with your body and really have the right focus of, you know, what your dressing goal is, what you want to improve, what area you want to highlight, what areas you don’t want to highlight because that will help you dress well and it will improve your confidence overall. And the whole goal of us doing this and working with your body shape is to make you feel and look your best, so it should be a positive experience.
Recognize what works
I don’t want any judging. I don’t want you to feel bad. None of those things. Okay, okay, let’s move on to the next step. Now that you know what your body shape is and what your dressing goals are, we can move on to the R in frame, which is to recognize what works in your inspo outfit that we are trying to recreate. And here’s the thing. I don’t have five models with five body shapes that I can use to demonstrate this whole method and process and show you how you how that looks like. But I do have access to AI,
So we’re going to get creative here, and we’re going to put AI into good use and actually use it to see how we can change an outfit to each of the five body shapes. So I want to be clear, it may not be 100% accurate, but the goal here is to give you an idea and an inspiration of how that actually looks like. So back to the R recognizing what works. So here’s the inspo outfit that we will be recreating to the five body shapes.
Or actually four, because the model in this photo looks like she has an hourglass shape. An hourglass shape is the easiest to work with. There’s not a lot to change. This photo is also AI by the way. Here you want to identify what part or parts of this outfit actually works for your body shape. So let’s go through each one of them. So if you have an apple shape, what works for you here is the straight leg pants because they will elongate the legs, create vertical lines and elongate the figure overall.
And this is something that we want to achieve with apple shape, because we want to kind of drift away from paying attention to the midsection and to other parts of the body. So straight legs here are perfect. And that’s something that we’re going to keep from the original look.
The other thing that works for Apple shape is the relaxed fit blazer. Because it doesn’t really cling to the torso. It hides the midsection and it provides structure which draws attention downwards. And this is exactly what we want.
So that’s another thing that we’re keeping. If you have a pear shape, what works for you here is the fact that the pants are high waisted, because we want to define the waist, and the fact that there are also straight leg that works for pear shape, but for a different reason than apple shape. Straight leg pants work for a pear shape because they don’t really emphasize the hips.
Results & recap
The final result of how we transform the inspo outfit to each of the four other body shapes you can see that each one of them looks slightly different but the overall look is definitely inspired by our original outfit and you can follow this method with any inspirational outfit that you come across you can redo this process determine what works for you remove what doesn’t match the overall aesthetic and emphasize your focal points I really hope this was helpful I hope that it gave you ideas and inspiration of how to go about dressing for your body shape.
