How to balance wider hips and a narrower top

What actually moves it

The instruction underneath all of these is the same one: quiet the half that already leads, and give the other half something to answer with.

8 rules in the table produce this effect: 5 in your favour, the largest worth +16, and 3 against, the largest worth -14. The deltas are what each is worth at full strength against a neutral garment, and they add, so one rule pulling -14 is not undone by two small ones pulling the other way.

• 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]
• A straight or tapered leg stops the widest point getting any wider. (+12, on wider hips with a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested) [spoon-clean-leg]
• 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]
• By the usual convention: pattern and detail above the waist balance a bottom-heavy frame. (+10, on narrow shoulders and wider hips, at every height and bone scale tested) [triangle-interest-up-top]
• A straight or tapered leg keeps the lower half quiet so the shoulders lead. (+9, on narrow shoulders and wider hips, at every height and bone scale tested) [triangle-clean-leg]

What works against it

The same table, read for what it penalises. The most expensive thing you can do to this goal is worth -14 on its own, which is past the ten points that move a garment from "depends" to "skip": volume starting at the hip adds width exactly where the frame already carries it.

Every rule on this half is keyed to narrow shoulders and wider hips, or wider hips with a defined waist, 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.

• Volume starting at the hip adds width exactly where the frame already carries it. (-14, on wider hips with a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested) [spoon-volume-at-hip]
• Extra volume below the waist compounds the widest part of the frame. (-13, on narrow shoulders and wider hips, at every height and bone scale tested) [triangle-wide-leg]
• By the usual convention: a bold pattern below the waist pulls the eye straight to the widest part of the frame. (-10, on nothing we probe with) [spoon-bold-pattern-below]

Where it depends, and on what

2 garments here are 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.

Whether there is a waist above the hip changes which rules fire, not which direction they point. Both shapes below are asked to keep the lower half clean, and both are given the shoulder as the place to add.

• Structured blazers: +16 on narrow shoulders and wider hips, 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.
• Wide-leg trousers: +12 on broad shoulders, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Wide-leg trousers: -13 on narrow shoulders and wider hips, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Wide-leg trousers: -14 on wider hips with a defined waist, 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.

7 of them never argued at full volume on the builds tested: spoon-volume-at-hip carries -14 and landed -9.3. 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.

1 of these could not be demonstrated on anything in our garment vocabulary: spoon-bold-pattern-below. It is in the table and fires on real products, but no garment we probe with carries the combination of attributes it needs. Saying so is cheaper than quietly dropping it.

• 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]
• A straight or tapered leg stops the widest point getting any wider. (+12, on wider hips with a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested) [spoon-clean-leg]
• 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]
• By the usual convention: pattern and detail above the waist balance a bottom-heavy frame. (+10, on narrow shoulders and wider hips, at every height and bone scale tested) [triangle-interest-up-top]
• A straight or tapered leg keeps the lower half quiet so the shoulders lead. (+9, on narrow shoulders and wider hips, at every height and bone scale tested) [triangle-clean-leg]
• Volume starting at the hip adds width exactly where the frame already carries it. (-14, on wider hips with a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested) [spoon-volume-at-hip]
• Extra volume below the waist compounds the widest part of the frame. (-13, on narrow shoulders and wider hips, at every height and bone scale tested) [triangle-wide-leg]
• By the usual convention: a bold pattern below the waist pulls the eye straight to the widest part of the frame. (-10, on nothing we probe with) [spoon-bold-pattern-below]
• 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]

Whose body this is, in our terms

The rules above are keyed to a classification, and the classification is what makes them computable. Narrow shoulders and wider hips, or wider hips with a defined waist are what people call them; the pages below are the same bodies under the name the scorer uses, with every garment we probe scored against them.

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.

• Narrow shoulders and wider hips, also called a pear shape or an A-shape: what we call a triangle.
• Wider hips with a defined waist, also called a pear shape with a nipped waist or hips wider than the shoulders: what we call a spoon.