Body shapes

One’s body shape takes on more significance in the summer when we wear lighter clothes and venture into holiday and swim wear. A woman’s shape and silhouette is rarely perfect – we all have our good points and less good points and the trick is to know your shape and choose clothes to complement. In A Guide to Elegance (21 April 2010) Madame Dariaux considers that the female figure can be reduced to a simple I or O shape or intermediate stages between these two letter forms. Another classification of the female shape draws parallels with fruit - apples or pears and yet another refers to geometric symbols such as the Triangle ▲for shapely hips, thighs and rounded bottom, the Rectangle █ representing the straight figure, the Circle ● for a rounded look (First Impressions http://tinyurl.com/3zsq6x).

The easiest classification that I’ve come across is based on the assessment of your silhouette as one of three body shapes - shaped, semi-shaped or straight (Liz Prest© Independent Styling Consultant) where the shaped bodyline has a defined waist and midriff, the semi-shaped has a softer shape with a curved waist and hips (weight gain tends to be on the stomach and hips) whereas the straight bodyline has slim hips and thighs. Of course you can be in between any of these classifications, but at a styling workshop, my non-scientific observation was that most of the women there were semi-shaped. In the next few blogs Liz will look at what style of clothes to look for to suit one of these three body shapes.