When Your Body Doesn't Match Your Style: How to Identify Your Body Type

We have spent the last two weeks talking about French girl style, fashion trends and creating a signature style of your own. But it's important to keep in mind that just because something looks good to you, that doesn't mean it will look good on you.

How do we find out what looks good, and how can we know in advance when something we have seen will not ultimately be right for us?

If those are your questions, too, stay tuned, because that's what we're talking about today...
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How to Identify Your Body Type

There are so many different ways to describe what makes you look the way you do. Whole systems are devoted to explaining it in all its complexity.

And once you understand it, the goal is to choose the way you dress accordingly. 

Some style systems will tell you how to dress so that you camouflage your flaws and look more like the current cultural ideal. Others suggest that it’s better that what you wear actually represents what you look like.

I believe, strongly, that you will look best if you wear yourself.

Your best plan is to wear the colors found in your eyes, skin, and hair. And the lines and shapes in your body.

Your silhouette is the overall shape of your body plus the way the shapes, proportions, and cut of your clothing cause that shape to appear. On the most macro level, clothing can do one of two things to shift the viewer’s perception of your silhouette - it can either elongate, creating a longer, leaner, more vertical line, OR it can emphasize curves by focusing in in-and-out horizontals, or fit-and-flare as it’s often called. Because these two things are literally opposites, you can only really get a dramatic effect by focusing on one. And, for virtually every woman, one is MUCH more effective than the other. - Rachel Nachmias
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Body Type: Shapes, Lines and Structure

If you are mostly lines, squares or rectangles, and your body is more straight than rounded, wear that in your clothes. If you are rounded shapes, circles and lots of in and out, rather than up and down, wear that. 

Are you a mix? Well, there you go.

And there are a plethora of system types that will try to offer themselves as matches for what you are seeing in the mirror and they come to you with a prescribed set of matching clothes and accessories. But the more clearly you can understand exactly what you are seeing in yourself, the easier it will be to personalize any recommendations you receive and individualize your style.

But how can you identify the shapes and lines you are made of?

David Kibbe, who wrote Metamorphosis in the late 80s and created a system that has influenced many other style systems since then, suggests that you sketch yourself.

Draw an outline of your body (some people trace over pictures) and then look for basic shapes and structure. 

The next two videos by Merriam Style, one of which is a video style type quiz, will help to explain this process of identifying your type.

​What did you discover about your type? Let me know in the comments.

Tomorrow, I'll share a bit about my own style journey & what I have identified as my own type.

See you then!

Love, Jeanine

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Once you identify your type,
​get started with creating
your capsule wardrobe by 
downloading the free printable
wardrobe planner.
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