How to create a waist on a straight torso

What actually moves it

A waist you do not have has to be implied by what sits above and below it, and a waist you do have only has to be left alone, so the same garment can be the answer to one and the mistake in the other.

4 rules in the table produce this effect: 3 in your favour, the largest worth +14, and 1 against, the largest worth -9. The deltas are what each is worth at full strength against a neutral garment, and they add, so one rule pulling -9 is not undone by two small ones pulling the other way.

• 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]
• By the usual convention: layers add the depth and shape a rectangular frame reads flat without. (+10, on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested) [rectangle-layer]
• A tapered leg narrows the bottom line and makes the upper body read broader by comparison. (+7, on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested) [rectangle-taper]

What works against it

The same table, read for what it penalises. The most expensive thing you can do to this goal is worth -9 on its own, which is short of the ten points that move a garment from "depends" to "skip", though it rarely arrives alone: fully unstructured pieces hang straight down and repeat the line you already have.

Every rule on this half is keyed to a straight up-and-down build, 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.

• Fully unstructured pieces hang straight down and repeat the line you already have. (-9, on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested) [rectangle-drape]

Where it depends, and on what

2 garments here are argued in both directions by the rules on this page, and a boxy jacket is the widest of them: +10 at one end and -16 at the other. That is the answer, not a failure to give one.

The rules also stack. 4 of the combinations below put two of them on the same person at once, and the largest lands +24 on a structured blazer once rectangle-structure and rectangle-layer have both fired. Two rules pulling the same way is the situation that produces the numbers people find hard to believe.

The dividing line is measured, not felt: the rules below fire on a torso whose waist reads close to its chest. If yours reads well inside it, the contrast set is your half of this page and the numbers there are the ones to act on.

• Boxy jackets: +10 on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Boxy jackets: -16 on a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Unstructured blazers: +13 on a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Unstructured blazers: +10 on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Unstructured blazers: -9 on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested.
• Structured blazers at the same build on a straight up-and-down build: +24, with rectangle-structure and rectangle-layer both firing.
• Structured blazers at 163cm on a straight up-and-down build: +24, with rectangle-structure and rectangle-layer both firing.
• Structured blazers at 188cm on a straight up-and-down build: +24, with rectangle-structure and rectangle-layer both firing.
• Structured blazers with a long torso on a straight up-and-down build: +24, with rectangle-structure and rectangle-layer both firing.

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.

3 of them never argued at full volume on the builds tested: hourglass-boxy-buries carries -16 and landed -10.7. 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: hourglass-stiff-bridges. 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.

• 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]
• By the usual convention: layers add the depth and shape a rectangular frame reads flat without. (+10, on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested) [rectangle-layer]
• A tapered leg narrows the bottom line and makes the upper body read broader by comparison. (+7, on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested) [rectangle-taper]
• Fully unstructured pieces hang straight down and repeat the line you already have. (-9, on a straight up-and-down build, at every height and bone scale tested) [rectangle-drape]
• A cut that follows the waist shows the line that is already there. (+13, on a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested) [hourglass-follows-waist]
• A high rise sits at the narrowest point rather than cutting across the hip. (+11, on a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested) [hourglass-high-rise]
• Boxy volume runs straight past the waist and reads wider than the body underneath it. (-16, on a defined waist, at every height and bone scale tested) [hourglass-boxy-buries]
• By the usual convention: stiff, heavy structure bridges from bust to hip and squares off a curve instead of following it. (-9, on nothing we probe with) [hourglass-stiff-bridges]

Whose body this is, in our terms

The rules above are keyed to a classification, and the classification is what makes them computable. A straight up-and-down build 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.

• A straight up-and-down build, also called a straight build or an H-shape: what we call a rectangle.