ANY Body Type Can Wear ANY Jeans (the secret is...)

I'll be honest, I'm not a believer that only certain body types can wear certain types of jeans. That just feels so 2003-17 magazine. But what I am a believer in is that certain elements of your jeans make it easier or harder to style based off of your own body construction. So here are some things that you may or may not know when it comes to finding the best jeans for your body type because I think that you can wear any jeans you want as long as you have some of these tricks in your back pocket. Let's start off with what I think is the most challenging part of jeans which is this part. This. Where it hits your body, how far up it comes, does it squish, what are the pockets like, all of that. Because let's be honest, if it doesn't fit right here, you're not going to like to wear those jeans. And one of the many reasons this area is so challenging is because it creates a horizontal line across your midsection which may or may not be welcomed at that particular moment in time. Horizontal lines are the darnedest lines. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. If it's working for you, love it. That's great. We don't need to worry about it right now. But if you feel like that horizontal line is not doing what you want it to do, here's something you can do instead. Pair the wash of your jeans or the color of your jeans with the same color family that you're wearing on top. So if you're wearing dark jeans, going with a darker top or if you're wearing light jeans, going with a lighter top. They don't need to match exactly. The idea is that you're lessening the contrast between your jeans and your top and then that line becomes a little bit softer. It's a little bit more forgiving when it's softer. If you like where the line is, then you can choose to either match the tones or go high contrast. If you want to wear light jeans and a black top or dark jeans and a light top and you like where that line is, you're gonna see that line. So as long as you're happy with it, then it's all good. But if you need forgiveness, then match accordingly. Now this may or may not be news to you, but fashion brands are lying to you. If you are looking at the words of what a rise is on a website or on a tag, ignore it. Nobody cares about the words. Actually, everyone cares about the words, but they're wrong. Now, if you've been around my channel for a while, I've talked about this ad nauseum. Has it changed the fashion industry? Absolutely not. But we will continue to talk about it. But I'm also going to ask you to not just measure your front rise, but to also measure your back rise. Low rise jeans would be a lot more popular if they had better back rises so that they didn't fall down every time you bend over in them. Because yes, yokes matter in creating a nice construction in your back end. Pockets matter in creating a nice proportional, do you want smaller pockets? The balanced size pockets for your booty, that's what everyone wants. But I would gladly trade any of those to have the perfect back rise. I think most of us just enjoy feeling comfortable and supported in our jeans. And a lot of times high rise checks that box, but also for some of us with short torso, long legs, then high rise is kind of challenging. So pay attention to the back rise because then you might be able to go to a lower mid-rise if that is more proportional for you, more comfortable, works with your outfit, with whatever you're wearing. We're going to go through all those other details here in a second. But if you're one of the horizontal body types, like pear shapes that have wider hips, you like to have that support down there too. So it's important to know your front rise and your back rise. And if you want some extra support, you want to make sure that construction is pretty solid. But to be honest, the same goes for any rise. You want to feel like you're supported in the front and you want to feel like you're covered in the back. The only way to know if this will be possible is to know your measurements and what you are looking for in your favorite, most fantastic pair of jeans. Will you always get this lucky? No. Will you have to try on lots and lots and lots of different jeans to finally get there? Yes. Because a mid-rise on you might be a high rise on me just because of the way my body type's constructed. Jeans really emphasize our vertical lines. It makes sense. Jeans go up and down your legs. Your legs are vertical, therefore vertical lines. So if you are not paying attention to your vertical body type, it is time to start paying attention to your vertical body type. So what is your vertical body type? I am 100% biased on this, but I honestly think your vertical body shape is so much more important than any other body shape because it's all about gaining proportions and balance your shoulders, waist to hips ratio. It's all about recognizing are your legs longer for your body type or are they shorter? Is your torso longer or is it shorter? With the end goal being that when you're standing upright and tall, that your body just feels really balanced. And when you feel balanced, you feel more comfortable and confident and all the great things that make great style. And I've gone into way more detail on how to find your vertical body shape in a video I will link at the end. So hold on tight to that because we're also going to talk about how long you want your legs to look here in a quick second. Okay, now that we've talked about this part of your pants, we're going to talk about the second part of your pants, which are the legs. All the way down. Whole thing. Again, this really ties into your vertical body shape because it's literally a vertical line. Your legs are vertical and they are very line like. So if you want that line to look bold and crisp and clean, then you're going to want to look for a wash that's bold and crisp and clean. So many jeans, so, so many jeans have little fades, fake fades, distressing, fake distressing. It is very hard to find just a flat wash. There's always a little bit of something somewhere. Even these jeans have just a little bit of striation on them. We don't always love that because that creates horizontal lines on your vertical lines. If you want to look more vertical, you don't want those extra horizontal lines. And those lines tend to happen more with lighter or medium wash jeans. Here's the thing. In all of this, when determining if you want to wear flared or bootcut or wide leg or straight leg or skinny, it all comes down to balance. You want to find the balance between the style and your body type and also your personal style. But we'll get to that section here in a minute. So let's talk about a couple of ways that you can create balance. If you have a curvy lower half or you feel like your hips have more emphasis in your entire body proportions, then you're going to want to go a little bit simpler. Since there's more emphasis down south, you want to have a little bit less emphasis from the jeans. This can be done through simple washes, little to no distressing, or any of those horizontal lines. But when you do that, you can kind of pick whatever cut or style of jeans that you want. Flare, bootcut, etc. You have more options when it comes to the style, but maybe fewer options when it comes to the colors and details. But let's say you want to go the more distressed route and you're still curvier on the bottom. You want more distressing, you want more fun, maybe you want patches. Then I would choose a simpler style or cut. Usually this comes in the form of a straight leg, but the idea is that your entire outfit is going to balance out some of that busyness with the simpler things. So you might also wear a simple top with that too. Again, we will get to the rest of your styling here in a second. Now let's go to the opposite end of the spectrum. Let's say you are more straight up and down on the bottom and more of emphasis is up top. Maybe you have an inverted triangle body type. You're going to want to create some curves and add some emphasis to your lower half. So flares and bootcuts and wide legs, that's going to create extra emphasis on the bottom to help balance you out the rest of your verticalness. Or maybe you want to play around with the distressing and color. Find other ways to achieve some balance. But if you feel like your jeans aren't achieving that balance, then it's up to the rest of your outfit to create that balance too. Okay, one last thing before we move on to styling. The length of your jeans is all part of this too. The color, the cut, and the length. My personal preference to help achieve balance is to match my inseam with my rise. So if I have a high rise jean, I like that to be a little bit more cropped and ankle length. Versus if I'm wearing a lower rise jean, then I like to bring that inseam down so that it's hitting closer to the floor. For me, this avoids having high rise really long jeans. Now if you're someone with short legs, this can probably work for you. And you are probably the exception to this rule. But on me, that makes my legs look so long that I can't make up those proportions anywhere else on my body. Unless I wear a dark top with it. Circling back all the way to our first tip of matching those colors. If it's a trickier one, it doesn't mean I can't wear it. It just means that I'm going to choose a dark top with a dark jean that is high rise and really long. Versus the other end of that example is a low rise jean that is cropped. And that can make it look like your jeans are too small or that you're wearing a child size. Which again, not ideal really for any body type. However, I would also describe that as a challenging rise. And so I would match the color of my shirt to the rise of my pants. So that if I'm wearing dark wash, low rise, cropped jeans, I would wear a dark top with it to kind of minimize a little bit of that look. But again, something that is low rise might not look low rise on you. So again, this is all subjective and based off of measurements and how it's looking on your body. So let's talk about some ways that we style jeans that make it easier to pull off certain styles than others. So one trick I like to use is I like to match the rise of my pant with my neckline. If I'm wearing something higher rise, then I like to wear a higher neckline. If I'm wearing something lower rise, then I like to wear a lower neckline. If you can see the rise, calling back to that very first tip, did you watch that very first tip? This is like a little mini quiz. If I can see where the rise of my pants are, then I match it to, or I match my top neckline to that. If you can't tell as much, then it doesn't matter as much. It's not having as big of a visual impact, but just like how your rise and your inseam can make a difference and how it moves up and down your body, so can your rise and your neckline and how that moves up and down your body. Everything is just moving with each other. And when you move one or change another, then you have to decide how obvious you want that change to be. Okay, so we've talked about styling your jeans and styling your top with your jeans. Now let's talk about how to style your shoes with your jeans. Now I could definitely make a much more in-depth video on this. In fact, my next video is going to be about choosing the right boots for your body shape and pairing it with jeans is going to be part of that. But there's so many other shoes than boots, so just let me know if you want that for the future. But essentially, you want to be choosing your footwear style and colors kind of in the same way that we've talked about tops. If you match the color of your shoes to your jeans, that is going to make your legs look longer. If that is your goal, that is how you achieve that. If you are making the rest of your body long or you don't want your legs to look as long because you feel like they're looking too long, then you may want to do a pop of color on the shoes. White shoes are really great for this. Red shoes can do that as well. Just something that's a different color. Now what you want to be careful of is if you're doing a different color shoe, a different color pant, and then you have a long coat. Regardless of whether or not you have a shirt that's the same color as your pants or not, all of those are playing a role. If you have a longer coat, that is cutting you off at the knees. And then if your shoes cut you off at the ankles, it could make your legs look shorter even if you're tall, even if you feel like your legs are long for your body. And you might blame your jeans for that when actually in that scenario it could be your jacket or it could be your shoes. But going back to that example where your coat is cutting off your legs and you're wearing a different color shoe, you can either change the color of your shoe to match your jeans so that it kind of just keeps going all the way down, or you could change the color of your coat. That way your coat is blending into your vertical line going all the way up. There's a lot of options in making all these different outfits work, you just have to figure out which is best for you in that particular outfit for that particular day. There are so many elements that come into creating an outfit that you feel good in your body in, that you feel like fits your style. But a lot of the tips I covered today helped me in some of the basic day-to-day outfit decision making or trying on jeans and figuring out which ones feel the best for me. And knowing all about my body type is a huge factor in that. So make sure to watch this video next and I will see you there.