Life Is Cake

… Some thoughts on why most of us look so bad wearing skinny pants. Skinny pants as a trend come and go, and your eye gets used to it, so eventually tjhis aquired taste becomes so pervasive that you stop noticing how bad you look wearing them. So here are some technical details explaining why the eye sees what it sees. … Whenever the eye meets something on the body where it can anchor, like, for instance, a horizontal line, such as a hem, it uses this anchor - the width, the height in this area as a starting point to construct the proportions of the body it sees. If there are two places on your body where the eye of the beholder can anchor itself, for instance a shirt hem and your pants hem, it anchors at the top, it anchors at the bottom, and uses the width at the top, the width at the bottom, and the distance between the two anchors to construct the proportions of your body. I will start by showing you myself wearing uncropped full-length skinny pants, and I am sure you will agree that even though I am not the curviest person, I still look atrocious wearing them. Because our eye is conditioned by fashion and beauty images with body proportions that have hardly any curves, we associate the least curvy bodies with the beautiful look, or the classy look, or the fashionable look. In other words, no matter how much we love our curves, and the uniqueness of our bodies, it still makes sense to look into streamlining our body proportions….

What’s the most popular subject in styling advice? “How to look 10lb thinner without dieting” (just manipulating focus points in your clothes). If this is the subject of interest to you, then, I would say, the height of your boots and the proportions of your footwear is of crucial importance for achieving this holy grail of looking slender and streamlined, no matter what body shape you are (which, basically, amounts to - even though I love my curves - minimizing those…) The eye of the beholder anchors on your body at places where you have either a prominent curve, such as a hip, or a thin area, such as an ankle, or where it sees a horizontal line, such as a hemline or the edge of your boot. The eye constructs the proportions of your body based on the difference between the widths it sees and the distance between the anchor points. So it’s the prominent contrast between the thick and the thin on your body that makes you look heavy. Our goal is to minimize this contrast…

Give yourself permission to be deeply shallow and to wallow in pretty cliches all the while supporting the fashion magazine fantasy of a flawless woman. Hide the flaws beneath sunglasses, cover them with layers of dazzling red lipstick and take your child to school at the crack of dawn feeling fabulous and in complete denial of the fact that you are half alive, and suffering from anxiety and a bad case of a confidence meltdown. We are here to tell you: it’s easy and it works. It’s OK to take that security blanket with you wherever you go, and to feel better about yourself just because you look good without trying and because low-hanging fruit is sometimes the best nourishment at a moment of motivational drought.