Fashion Friday: Find your fashion "shape"

I've been thinking long and hard how to word this post without offending anyone or coming across as "yay look at me I'm so skinny" but feel I have to address the topic of dressing to suit your shape, so please bear in mind this post isn't meant as a putdown to anyone or a self gratifying post. I want to address this mainly because for the first 36 years of my life I didn't dress to suit my shape and it led to many a fashion disaster!

We've all seen them right? The people who should get pulled over by the fashion police as soon as they left the house! But I think there is a HUGE difference between dressing with personal style (no matter how bright or flamboyant) and looking like you wore your three year olds cast offs, or like you are drowning in a sea of fabric. If you don't know what I'm talking about check out people of walmart, or the example from their site below

There is a HUGE difference to me between the above, which is dressing inappropriately (based on age, size of garment, location etc), and there is dressing with your own flair. I always think of Penelope Garcia from Criminal Minds when I think of the fashion with flair! I know, it's a character from a show ,but you get the idea! She loves color, loves quirky styles, and always looks good! Whoever does the wardrobe for this character nails it!

Example #1

Wearing clothes that are too small. As you know I love thrift shopping, and on one occasion I saw a red t-shirt with the slogan "brunettes do it better". Loved it, tried it on, nope too small. Sure it was 'skinny' style but there is skinny style, and there is "makes you look 10lbs heaver skinny style". Imagine my surprise next time I was in the store, to see a woman probably 10 years younger than me but 50lbs heavier wearing that exact t-shirt! I wanted to take this lady aside and tell her she looked like 50lbs of cotton stuffing shoved inside a 5lb bag! I know you know what I'm talking about!


Example #2
This affliction isn't just for the larger ladies though! No!  No way, no how! For the smaller ladies it tends to be the flipside, they tend to be dressing in clothes that are 6+ sizes to big, opting for clothes to disguise any shape whatsoever, maybe it's a disguise? This tends to happen a lot in younger women, late teens early 20's. Or sometimes those that have lost a lot of weight or simply just aren't comfortable in their own body shape. They tend to 'hide' in the clothes. I admit I was guilty of this for MANY MANY years, and had shirts that I could fit two people in and they billowed out in ways that if a strong gust of wind came by I could have taken off like a kite!

Conclusion

Over the next few weeks I'm going to touch on ways we can dress to suit our shapes. I think we can all agree that one size does NOT fit all, don't pigeon hole me! But we CAN dress to flatter our shape, to hide things we don't like and accentuate things we do. 

Hopefully over the next few weeks I'll share some things I personally have learned in the last two years, and how dressing more flattering to MY shape has increased my confidence in leaps and bounds!