My blog is dedicated to providing styling resources and clothing reviews for petite-pear shaped women!
This has been a much requested post that I finally had the time to organize! I gathered as much size and height info as I could for this post. That you could find bloggers who are most similar to you. However, I hope that you’ll explore outside of just your size because there is style inspiration to be found from all of these amazing women!
I’m so excited to be sharing this post with you all today because it is about time that we had more brands offering trendy petite clothes! Tasha Harris is the founder of Charrish11, an online boutique dedicated to petite and curvy women. What inspired her to start the brand was her own struggle to find trendy and cute clothing that fit her personal style and petite pear shape. Her biggest shopping pain point of all — jeans! I am right there with her, it’s something that I’m constantly on the hunt for because it can be tricky to find ones that don’t require alterations and ones that are curve friendly. Like me she has had the same frustration of trying on jeans only to find out that there is a massive waist gap in the back. Tasha is an expert of pear-friendly and petite fashion so when you shop at her boutique you can trust the pieces will fit your pear shape :)
I have waited to write this post because I knew I need to do more work to understand white supremacy, white privilege, systemic racism, white fragility and subtle racism.
The deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and Tony McDade (if you are not familiar with him please read about him here because Black Trans Lives matter too) are unjust and tragic. I’ve found myself asking what I can do to help and how can I affect positive change. The truth is that it should have never taken these events to push me to take action in the first place. The loss of innocent Black people at the hands of the police due to excessive force and racism is nothing new, but it is unacceptable. As a society, we have for too long turned a blind eye.
Since embarking on the journey of starting my own brand, I’ve learned so much about how pants are supposed to fit. While my brand LNO STUDIO focuses on trousers (at the moment), the principles I’ve learned can be applied to denim as well. I want to share these lessons with you because I know they’ll come in handy when you’re shopping for jeans. Furthermore, these tips will help you find jeans that you actually want to wear and keep. I know for myself that I tend to keep clothes longer when they fit me well because they are more comfortable!
What is body positivity anyways? How did the movement start?
Scrolling through your Instagram feed or reading articles on Refinery 29, you’ve probably noticed the words “body positivity” thrown around. Body positivity was a concept I first encountered when I started blogging nearly 4 years ago. While I initially thought I understood what these words meant, over time I realized there was a lot more history that I needed to explore.
Last summer, I spent time reading about the history of the fat activism movement in order to better understand the origins of the body positivity movement. Additionally, I interviewed a plus sized blogger, Nyla, who I had been a following on Instagram for a while and has strong understanding of the movement.
Have you ever wondered why you wear a size 4 in one clothing brand and a size 6 in another clothing brand?
I interview my friend Mary Reed, who's a technical designer to better understand why clothing brands fit differently. In the fashion industry, technical designers are responsible for translating a designer’s vision into a wearable reality and ensuring that garments fit as intended.
Most clothing brands use a fit model to size their garments and determine fit. You might be wondering what is a fit model? A fit model is the person a fashion company uses as their "sample size" to fit garments. Generally the fit model represents who the company deems their target customer so she or he should have the same body type as their target customer. Most clothing brands use a fit model who represents the middle of their size range. If they are developing a clothing line with sizes 0 - 12, then they will most likely use a fit model that is a size 4 or 6. Then clothing brands use a process called “grading” to develop the other sizes in the range. To create the different sizes of a scale, the technical designer will change certain “points of measurement”, such as the bust or waist by specific increments to create the other sizes.
Ultimately we wear different sizes across different brands because clothing companies use different fit models. While it can be frustrating at times that all brands do not fit the same, it would be worse if there was one standard size and that size didn’t fit your body type. Finding clothes that fit is a challenge, but we have to find the brands that work for us and then go from there.
If my friend and (photographer) Mary hadn’t encouraged me to try on this dress at Aritzia, I’m not sure if I would have. Wearing this dress made me realize that I shy away from sharing clothes on my blog that are curve hugging. Scrolling through my previous outfit blog posts made this abundantly clear to me. I only saw myself wearing 2 styles I would considered “body con” or “curve hugging”. I’m sure that if you have been following my blog, you have probably noticed this too. My tendency is to wear A-line dresses and skirts more than anything because they feel safe.
Shopping for clothes can be difficult, but if you know a few of your body measurements, it's much easier to find clothes will fit you (especially when shopping online). So I'm sharing my guide for taking your own body measurements for clothing. The good news is you can take them all by yourself in probably less than 5 minutes. Before you start, be sure to grab a flexible measuring tape!
My video and photo guides below will show you how to measure the following parts of your body: Bust, Waist, Hips, and Inseam. These are the most common measurements you will see on retailers' size charts online.
