By giving yourself a restrictive view of it—Hourglass, Pear, Inverted Triangle, etc.
How to Dress for your Body Shape: An Essential Guide.
A headline of a famous fashion article that 18-year-old Marissa comes across. She earnestly starts reading through it and then ventures to the next similar piece to figure out her body’s natural shape. The problem? Nothing describes her body completely or enough for it to fit into a single mold. Her hips are more expansive than her upper body (Pear?), yet her shoulders are broad, and her bust is full(hourglass), and at the same time, her waist is undefined (rectangle?). Some of the advice she finds is also contradicting, making the clothing garments look wrong on her body. However, eventually, Marissa compromises and aligns her body to the description she sees fit in an attempt to find a ready-made solution. Thus, she can conform to it despite its flaws.
You’re likely familiar with the various body types out there if you’ve ever paid any attention to fashion through blogs, quizzes, or media. You may even have given it some serious thought by whipping out a measuring tape or a tool to outline your own body and later further analyze it in a mirror.
And if you were lucky enough, maybe you fit the description perfectly and found a slew of adequate information on how to dress in one go.
In reality, however, a high percentage of these body classifications are made for women who aren’t so fortunate.
The unaccounted-for variety of human bodies.
When did the fruit body system originate? It’s unknown; however, its origins are in the fashion industry. Where the body gains fat and then assigning the label apple-shaped for the upper body and pear-shaped for the lower body was the most researched by scientists in body classifications. Even then, the typing isn’t done on aestheticism and categorization being the focus but on how fat depositions affect health.
Names such as pear or apple shouldn’t even be the proper terms used as the information only pertained to where the body gained fat; instead, the terms originally coined by Vague are more favorable. These were android for upper body fat, gynoid for lower body fat, and intermediate for equal distribution (Thoma Marie E et al., 2012). And the same fat gained, when finally lost, can potentially change the habitual shape of one’s body drastically.
Observations that are a product of the industry it evolved in, fashion, historically, also haven’t been all-encompassing when it comes to the variety of human bodies.
Human bodies have a diversity that prevents them from fitting neatly into designated boxes. The fact that bodies change over a lifetime depending on muscle and fat gain or loss and hormonal changes makes it more challenging to determine a proper natural shape. A generally static factor after puberty, such as height, is also a problematic factor to account for. A woman with “an hourglass figure” at 5’3″ with proportions of 36–24–36 often looks curvier than a woman with a similar build at 5’10” (Sir-mix-a-lot made a good point here). Thus even the reliance on body measurements for body shape classification can prove flawed as numbers on a measuring tape and the outline of a body can rival one another.
Therefore, the fruit body shape system assumes that the women who use it are experiencing regular hormones, have low body fat percentages, no muscle gain from weightlifting, and above all else, no matter their ethnicity or genetics, easily fit into a predetermined system.
A cookie-cutter image.
Wear extreme shoulder pads from the 80s, all you pear-shaped ladies. And may I recommend the pannier from the 18th century for the ones with inverted triangles?
Whenever any shape besides the hourglass has a guide on how to dress for your form, the inclination is to redesign that body shape using fashion into a bootleg version of the hourglass. These recommendations are ridiculous for this day and age. However, notice that each clothing garment presented as an option aims to convey a feature that naturally, according to body shape, doesn’t come with it.
Most people looking for their body shape shouldn’t wish to fit into a mold of what they likely can never be (the bone structure is genetic, and muscle mass’s power in changing one’s body is good, but not magic).
Why does the fruit shape system appeal to so many?
People love to generalize. You see this everywhere. It makes life so much easier when you don’t have to delve into every topic to explore its nuances.
For people who aren’t familiar with the influence of the body on fashion, the fruit shape system can seem pretty straightforward. Once I learn which body shape I am, that’s all I need to look good in my clothes.
It may give you one or two tips, but the body you possess is much more complicated, so there will always be things you need to figure out separately.
Are there any alternatives?
The kibbe body typing system has been gaining popularity for being a much more refined guide than the fruit shape system on how to dress. This is because there are more variations in the shapes it chooses in addition to being more body positive as senses value in each figure. That said, there are still flaws to it, and it shouldn’t be looked at as an end all, be all of learning how to dress, just a more fleshed-out version of the fruit body shape system.
It’s always going to seem more convenient to have a one-in-all easy-to-follow set of rules telling you what to do. However, what’s often missed is there are still going to be pieces of the puzzle that are gone, often in huge chunks. Only incorporate what makes sense to you and makes you feel confident. And do all the independent research you can to glue all the information together on what you believe is the best fit for your style, personally and in what you wish to convey to others.
Some of what the guides don’t include is, firstly, advice that isn’t tailored specifically to every single part of your body (the mold you chose has sharp square shoulders while you have soft rounded ones), skin tone, undertone, personal aesthetic, fabric and material, clashing patterns, etc.
Learning about your style is lifelong and personal and thus shouldn’t be summed up in a single guide. Instead, take what is valuable in it and don’t obsess over a single metric.
Mentioned sources:
“Apple-, Pear-Shaped Body Determined by Genetics, Study Says.” UPI, UPI, 19 Feb. 2019, https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2019/02/18/Apple-pear-shaped-body-determined-by-genetics-study-says/4531550526093/.
Note: It helps to read the entire article on what the study mentioned, as the title points to a misleading conclusion. The study concluded that while a disposition toward belly fat is partly genetic, environmental causes are a much more significant factor.
Thoma, Marie E, et al. “Comparing Apples and Pears: Women’s Perceptions of Their Body Size and Shape.” Journal of Women’s Health (2002), U.S. National Library of Medicine, Oct. 2012, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3466911/.