Your Ultimate Guide: 7 Rules To Look Less Frumpy (Part I)

Tina, here.

The secret need of most women is not how to be more "in style", but how to have enduring style. The A Number One rule for how to have enduring and fabulous style is to learn how to dress less frumpy (or rather less frumpily ). Tired of your style? Bored with your wardrobe? What about a muffin top? Double chin? Thunder thighs? Good dressing is a game of millimeters, dolls. An outfit can be made or ruined by the length of your skinny jeans, or the toe of your shoes, the way you button your blouses and sweaters, the way a pashmina sits on your shoulders or where the back pockets of your jeans hit your bum. Since none of these issues are really that important considering what's going on in the world and the fact that we all need to be spending as little time as possible worrying about how we look and dress, I'm going to solve these dilemmas for you right now so you can get on with living out your calling, whatever that may be. It's when clothes are wrong that they become over-important because we are worried about ourselves, and not the ones we love. This will be fun. And easy, I promise. Be sure to check all month long for exclusive Insider access to early shopping and fun resources. And have you seen the latest exclusive content inside the Complete Vault? Scroll through to see which posts and videos you may have missed lately!

Your Ultimate Guide: 7 Rules To Look Less Frumpy

Rules At A Glance, Part I

1. Belt It

Complete Insiders, Parts II and III can be found in the Complete post now, and will be released on the public blog throughout the month. If you'd like to experience early access to posts like these, plus exclusive content, become a Complete Insider today for free!)

Ok here we go. None of these rules are hard to practice. In fact, they'll all pretty much have you saying, Oh! Why didn't I think of that?! because they are relatively small tweaks to what you're already doing, but will give you massive, positive results. Not even kidding. You won't believe the compliments you'll start getting. People will wonder if you lost weight or had a facelift because you will look so good. Without doing anything drastic.

1. Belt It

Men are rectangles. Women are hourglasses. We are built to be curvy. The ideal perfect female figure, according to science (and the way God made us), is an hourglass, meaning it is desirable to have a bust and hips, with a waist in the middle. This is cause to rejoice for all women, curvy or not. Rejoice if you are busty. Celebrate your hips. Our frames are made to bear children. My childhood doctor once told me I had birthing hips. Thanks a lot. And they never birthed any children, but whatever, moving on (after much self-work on body image and embracing we are fearfully and wonderfully made by our Father). Balance and proportion are the 2 goals of good dressing because the human eye perceives this as beautiful. Bust - waist - hips. It doesn't matter how many inches your measurements are because we can create balance and proportion regardless. We can create this balance and proportion with the clothes you wear. And what about that waist? We can create that, too. Which will create the perfect hourglass shape even if nature did not give it to you, or it's been lost over time.

How, you wonder? With a belt. (Don't worry - if you cannot bring yourself to wear a belt, I have another really good tip for you to create a waist without a belt. See the next rule.) If you are high-waisted, like I am, my belts want to settle right under my bust. Not comfortable. If you are low-waisted, your belts will want to naturally fall on your hip bones. Not always attractive. But we can create a waist in the middle by cinching a belt there. It may not feel natural at first, but you can get used to it.

Before: no shape

After: hourglass (the belt creates the illusion of balance with a cinched-in waist)

Many of your belts you wear with jeans, a bit lower on your hips, may be too long once you bring them up on your waist (or place where you want to create a waistline). No problem. Just pull the strap beyond the holes to tighten, move the prong on the buckle out of the way by moving it up to the top of the buckle without running it through one of the holes, and then tuck the extra strap, like in the picture above. It should hold in place if it's not a real slippery belt.

Want to know the rest of the rules now? If you're a Complete member, you can hop on over to the Complete Style Vault for the rest of this post! Click here. Or stay tuned here where we'll be sharing Parts II and III later this month.

Thanks for reading!

Best,

Tina

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