How to balance broad shoulders

What actually moves it

Most shoulder advice is written for people who need more shoulder, and it is repeated at people who already have one until they buy the exact garment that tips them over.

5 rules in the table produce this effect: 2 in your favour, the largest worth +12, and 3 against, the largest worth -15. The deltas are what each is worth at full strength against a neutral garment, and they add, so one rule pulling -15 is not undone by two small ones pulling the other way.

• A softer, unstructured shoulder lets a strong upper body read relaxed instead of imposing. (+12, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-soft-top]
• Volume below the waist answers the shoulders and evens the silhouette out. (+12, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-volume-below]

What works against it

The same table, read for what it penalises. The most expensive thing you can do to this goal is worth -15 on its own, which is past the ten points that move a garment from "depends" to "skip": your shoulder line already leads. More structure there tips the whole silhouette top-heavy.

Every rule on this half is keyed to broad shoulders, so it is describing a garment against a body rather than a garment on its own. A garment is not the problem; a garment on this body is.

• Your shoulder line already leads. More structure there tips the whole silhouette top-heavy. (-15, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-extra-structure]
• A skinny leg under broad shoulders exaggerates the triangle into a caricature. (-14, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-skinny-leg]
• Heavy fabric up top piles mass onto the half that already has it. (-11, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-heavy-top]

Where it depends, and on what

1 garment here is argued in both directions by the rules on this page, and a structured blazer is the widest of them: +16 at one end and -15 at the other. That is the answer, not a failure to give one.

None of these rules stack: no garment we probe trips two of them on the same body at the same build, so every number on this page is one rule acting alone.

This is advice for a shoulder line that already leads. If your shoulder measures close to your waist, every sign on this page flips, and the rules that do the flipping are named below rather than left implied.

• Structured blazers: +16 on narrow shoulders and wider hips, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Structured blazers: +14 on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Structured blazers: +11 on wider hips with a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Structured blazers: -15 on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested.

Every rule, with the number it carries

The full set, ours and the ones that contradict it, with ids so you can hold us to them. A rule from geometry is stated flat; one that rests on convention is marked as convention, because "this is how it is done here" and "this is how it works" are different claims.

2 of them never argued at full volume on the builds tested: spoon-shoulder-answers-hip carries +11 and landed +7.3. Every rule is graded by how firmly the body sits inside the label that fired it, so a body near a threshold gets a quieter version of the same opinion rather than the full one, and the delta is the ceiling rather than the reading.

Every rule here was demonstrated on a real garment in the list above, so nothing on this page is a claim we could not fire.

• A softer, unstructured shoulder lets a strong upper body read relaxed instead of imposing. (+12, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-soft-top]
• Volume below the waist answers the shoulders and evens the silhouette out. (+12, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-volume-below]
• Your shoulder line already leads. More structure there tips the whole silhouette top-heavy. (-15, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-extra-structure]
• A skinny leg under broad shoulders exaggerates the triangle into a caricature. (-14, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-skinny-leg]
• Heavy fabric up top piles mass onto the half that already has it. (-11, on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested) [inverted-heavy-top]
• Structured shoulders widen the top line and pull the eye upward, away from the hips. (+16, on narrow shoulders and wider hips, at every height and bone scale tested) [triangle-structure]
• Structure at the shoulder builds the V-taper a straight frame does not have naturally. (+14, on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested) [rectangle-structure]
• Structure at the shoulder answers the hip and squares the silhouette up. (+11, on wider hips with a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested) [spoon-shoulder-answers-hip]

Whose body this is, in our terms

The rules above are keyed to a classification, and the classification is what makes them computable. Broad shoulders is what a person calls it; the pages below are the same body under the name the scorer uses, with every garment we probe scored against it.

Each of those pages runs the same rules across seven builds rather than one, which is where a number that moves with your height stops being an average and becomes your number.

• Broad shoulders, also called a V-shaped build or an athletic build: what we call an inverted triangle.