SELECTING NEW CLOTHES THAT WILL SLENDERIZE YOU
Now that we have improved the clothes on hand, let us think about the purchase or making of new ones.
If you make your own clothes you can work out the points for yourself as you adopt them. If you have a dressmaker, gain her cooperation. She may not understand the principles of “optical illusion,” but she will be delighted to have suggestions that tend to slenderize, and I am sure she will work with you happily in carrying out the ideas and instructions given.
A shirt waist dress, when all of one color, is often becoming, but the lines must all point downward and the waist line must be straight and easy.
In remodeling, as you see, a new collar has been provided, the shoulder shortened, fulness cut out at the shoulder, cuff narrowed to allow the sleeves to be lifted, the belt opened and lined to give ease and width.
The skirt was shortened at the top and attached to a camisole brassiere. The fulness of the skirt was brought around and tucked to give desired length line.
Before buying a new dress, suit, or wrap, study fashion pictures, dozens of them, and try to determine how your type should express the “new” in fashions. Choose what you like best in the new mode, cut out the pictures from the magazines and fashion publications, go over them carefully again and again, and determine by study and elimination what dress and wrap will give the best result for the money spent.
As an aid in obtaining other valuable pointers, when you go into the shops to try on new dresses, observe the saleswoman very closely.
She may not understand either what you mean by “optical illusion,” but if you understand the principles you can get a great deal of help from her for she will let you know at once what is out of proportion in your figure, what there is about your shape that doesn’t correspond to their models. She will invariably say, “I am afraid your hips are too big for that dress,” or “We have only a few dresses that will fit you. You are too large in the bust for that,” etc. Now, keep your disposition and listen, then determine to go home and concentrate upon making less conspicuous the part that strikes her as being out of proportion. Remarkable improvements may be made in this way and the “hardened” saleswoman can truly be of service, for she, unlike your friends, is not inclined to flattery unless she has visions of a sale.
Even in a surplice waist, length can be attained, as the illustration shows. Sleeve trimmings should be avoided that come even with the waist line. As you see, they give width where length is needed. Heavy stiff trimmings are difficult and must be very smart to be attractive. The softer, more slender the trimming, the better usually. Skirts should be designed to be free of flare.
Current fashions are always whimsical but back of every dress or underneath it is a foundation that makes the skeleton of the dress. This you must observe in every pattern you use or dress you buy. The trimming you can vary to suit your needs in slenderness, but your foundation lines must be suitable if you use trimming.
A variety of dresses are given, shown on the opposite page—the waist line dress, the narrow panel front, the wide panel front, the draped side line, and the tunic line. These represent good foundations and are in themselves slenderizing, providing you adhere to the code of long lines and simplicity in decoration and ornament.
Only careless persons can afford to buy clothes haphazardly. Even the slender woman thinks about them and plans about them. And just consider what a corps of helpers she has! A thousand hands to work to make modish clothes for the perfect 36, while only a dozen in proportion are working for us big folk! So it is easy to see why we must learn for ourselves what we can and cannot wear, what to emphasize and subdue. “We cannot eat our cake and have it too,” is a line familiar to us all. We can’t enjoy our pounds unless we work to dress them so that their number is not even surmised, let alone accurately guessed.
One clever woman I know, capable of making her own frocks and coats as well, visits the exclusive shops, buys the most becoming, simple dress that she finds, often paying as much as $200 for it. This she copies in other shades and materials, developing three or four distinctly becoming dresses at far less cost than the original gown. By averaging up she has modestly priced frocks, all smart, in good taste, and wearable.
I have always said that if I should ever go into the dress business, it would be to make slender dresses for big folks, and I would employ all big women to sell them, because, as I said about our jolly big friend, the corsetiere, she has an understanding heart, knows how difficult it is to find dresses that have enough youth, enough value in line, and are sufficiently becoming to us who tip the scales to any great degree. And she would lend aid to the discouraged soul that needs to seek and try, experiment and insist until she finds that which is becoming.