Horizontal Stripes are Flattering After All
Wallingford – April 2010 Everyone who has been pregnant knows that as much as you can love your bump, it can make you feel large and frumpy at times. Dressing to make yourself feel like the gorgeous, blossoming woman you are is not always easy. Knowing whether to wear patterns, stripes, or blocks of colour to flatter your new figure can be a bit of a minefield and many of us revert back to wearing black, black, black.
The accepted wisdom from fashion gurus is that an outfit with vertical stripes appears to elongate your figure by drawing the eye up and down. But recent research has proved that in fact, the opposite is true and horizontal stripes are the most flattering for anyone with a less than perfect physique.
Dr Peter Thompson, a psychologist and expert in visual perception at the University of York, studied this phenomenon and concluded that “horizontal stripes don’t make you look fatter”.
His tests involved showing drawings of two women, side by side, to 20 individuals. One woman wore horizontal stripes and the other wore vertical stripes. After around 200 repetitions over which the body size of either woman was varied, he concluded that the women wearing vertical stripes needed to be 6% thinner for the pairs to be judged the same.
Thompson, who presented his work at the British Association Festival of Science, said the effect is a version of the Helmholtz illusion, an optical effect in which a square with horizontal stripes appears taller and thinner compared with an identically sized one with vertical stripes.
What’s more, it would seem this belief has been around for some time and we are just a little late to cotton on to the idea. Helmholtz noted that his theory applied to fashion as well as squares and that ladies in the 19th century wore horizontal stripes to make them look taller.
It is also believed that the kind of stripe you choose can make a difference to how flattering the item of clothing can be. A fairly narrow stripe is universally flattering and a distortion of stripes across the body is much more forgiving than a block of stripes without movement. Mama Cocoon’s maternity and nursing top in navy and white stripes is the ideal design to flatter a pregnant figure. The stripes are perfectly sized to ease those ‘dumpy’ feeling days and make your body look longer whilst the organic cotton with lycra fits your bump beautifully to allow the pattern to move with the contours of your body.
The top is available in three sleeve lengths, in sizes 10-16, and is priced at £19.99. For more information please visit www.mamacocoon.co.uk
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