Basic fashion intuitions for trans women: Shape

This is not intended to be authoritative, I do not necessarily know what I’m doing. However people tell me I look good, particularly people who have unambiguously good taste. People wanted a menswear guy for trans women. This is certainly not that, but it’s a start.

Notice what feels good

I think for many people, but especially trans women, this might be the hardest part. If your only relationship to your appearance is a sense of deep unhappiness then you’ll eventually grow numb to any finer details.

But for me personally, it was the origin of my fashion sense. Looking in the mirror and noticing what felt good, what felt bad, eventually learning the relationship between those feelings and the clothes. Indeed this process was how I made the decision to transition in the first place.

You most likely do possess this sense! Fashion is culture, culture is by necessity good at embedding itself in the psyche. You might not be able to describe why an outfit looks off, but there will likely be some part of your brain producing a vague sense of wrongness.

Noticing the feeling reliably will take some practice, but you can often practice pretty cheaply. One place I lived in had a charity shop containing £1/item racks. Frequently, if I was bored and didn’t have anything better to do, I’d go in and grab 10 things that looked vaguely interesting. Then I’d get home and try each piece on with varying combinations of clothes I already owned. Half the time I’d end up returning everything I purchased, but even if I decided that none of it was any good 2 months later, well, only £10. No big deal.

Having an archetype that you’re aiming for can also be quite helpful. It both gives you something to direct your criticism towards besides your own appearance, communicating cultural affiliation is one the primary tasks of fashion in the first place.

So pick some broad category you want to indicate membership of, then see consider how the outfit you’re wearing either contributes (or fails to contribute) to that. In case it’s helpful, the archetype I’m usually aiming for is “Young biology graduate student”.

Dressing to your body

That being said the purpose of writing this post is to provide some pointers you can use to make that sense more prominent, but if the advice here is at odds with what feels good then defer to the feeling.

First things first: Work with what you have. Everyone has a mixture classically feminine and classically masculine features. Assuming that what you care about is conventionally attractive femininity, you’ll want to highlight the feminine attributes and de-emphasize the masculine ones. Something I see often see is trans women inadvertently gravitating towards dresses that accentuate shoulder width, like the one below.

A straight neckline draws the eye to the shoulders, while spaghetti straps emphasize their width. Shoulder width is one of the defining features of a masculine silhouette; there’s a reason suit jackets tend to have padded shoulders.

A plunging V-neckline will be much more flattering to most trans women.

Me getting ready for date night in Philly

This draws attention your breasts and collarbones, while the wide straps and diagonal lines of the V make the shoulders appear narrower. This may not be a great idea if you’re worried about chest hair, in which case I would recommend a shallower V neck, or one of more circular boat necks.

I think that playing with the midriff is often a great strategy for trans women. While the idealized shape for men is a V descending from the shoulders to the hips, as opposed to an hourglass for women, my own observations are that waist:hip ratio tends to be one of the less dimorphic features. This means that tops which taper towards the waist, before flaring out at the hips, fit most people, irrespective of whether they want through male or female puberty, hence one of my favourite tops being, weirdly enough, this piece of merchandise I got from an internship.

Being 6’5” my issue tends to be finding clothes where the taper actually occurs at my waist, as opposed to my chest.

You can add this effect in a variety of different ways, such as by wearing tight fitting tops that slide over jeans belted onto the hips

or by wearing a jacket/cardigan that tapers sharply while flaring out everywhere else. (though I don’t have great examples of this due to aforementioned issue: it is hard to find clothes which taper to where your waist actually is as a 6’5” woman).

It’s for these reasons that I almost exclusively wear mid-rise jeans. If my bottoms sit on my waist then I look like a board as my WHR disappears. If they’re too low on the hips then my tummy hangs out over the belt results in a “beer belly” appearance. Middle of to slightly below the belly button is what I aim for. The former consideration is why I don’t tend to wear skirts. Women’s skirts are design to sit on the waist, not down by the hips. I can offset this with a cardigan but it’s rarely my preferred option.

I was also intending to write a section on colour, but this post ended up significantly longer than I expected to be. And, despite this, I haven’t covered many other useful intuitions about shape mostly learned as a result of my own missteps. So it looks like those will be coming in separate posts.