Meeting The Edges: Why Lines Matter To A Look

How you dress gives you an edge in your professional and personal life. It helps solidify your image, and it plays a huge role in your first impressions. But, if you want this edge to be as sharp as possible, then you must walk the right lines in putting your look together. It’s called Line & Design. 

Highlighting Verses Camouflaging 

If you’re just throwing on whatever looks are popular in the local display windows or that are tending on social media, then you’re not being as edgy as you might think. After all, we all have different body types, shapes, and dimensions that make clothing fit and look differently from one person to another. 

So, if you really want to give your look an edge, then you’ll pay close attention to how the edges and lines of the actual garments work with or against your particular body. Dress for you! 

Correctly using the key design and line elements ensures that your assets are maximized and your less desirable areas are minimized. It’s a balance of highlighting and camouflaging, and it doesn’t happen if you ignore the importance of selecting the right neckline, waistline, and hemline for each area of your unique body. 

What Is Line & Design? 

All outfits have two manageable components that control how a particular piece of clothing looks on your body – external silhouette and internal design. Let’s take a look at both and how they apply to your look. 

1. The External Silhouette 

As the name implies, this is the outside appearance of the garment. 

The external silhouette is much more than clothing size. Why? As you’ve likely already experienced, a small in one style or brand may be equivalent to another’s medium or large. 

Size is a guide, but just how closely or loosely a garment fits to your body should be your ultimate checklist. External silhouette encompasses how each area of the garment conforms to various aspects of your physical shape. A proper fit here is what enhances your features. 

The key is to think about the shape, not merely size, of the garment in contrast to your body shape. Curved body shapes, for example, will be most comfortable and aesthetically pleasing when wearing a curved-shape garment. Meanwhile, straight-shapes work best for straight body types. 

If you’ve been wondering why your best features aren’t standing out, then you’ve likely been wearing garment shapes not congruent with your body shape. Doing so can both exaggerate your problem areas and distort or hide your best features. 

Using the correct shapes and colors will act like a guide for how onlookers take in your look, too. It offers them signage along their visual roadmap of your outfit. Look here. Don’t look there. 

Getting the external line and design right is a very powerful tool in drawing and distracting the eye of the beholder exactly where you want it, and that power goes a very long way in how comfortable and confident you feel in an outfit. 

2. Internal Design 

Amazingly, internal design has just as much to do with the outward appearance as the garment’s coloring and shape. The right internal design enhances the work you’ve done above. Why? How? 

It’s the internal structure that holds the garment’s ideal shape and positioning on your body. 

An appropriate, quality internal design is essential to fine-tune your shape enhancement, which minimizes problem areas and enhances assets. Get this area right, and you can create any illusion you’d like – more or less weight, less or more height, more or less waistline, less or more bust, etc. 

Where Do You Want Eyes To Go? 

Dressing is as easy as throwing on any type, shape, and color of clothing. Dressing to give yourself an edge in life, though… that takes much more careful attention to designs and lines in relation to your body. 

Whether it’s enhancing or minimizing your neckline, waistline, or hemline, prioritizing external silhouette and internal design in your clothing selection gives you the ultimate control over appearance and how you feel wearing clothes.