How To Choose a Prom Dress for Your Body Shape

While prom may look different this year, the tradition still goes on. This is a highlight in the life of many teenagers, so picking out a dress is an important memory. However, dress shopping does have its challenges. Learning how to choose a prom dress for your body shape takes time and personal understanding. Fortunately, there are a few simple rules to help guide anyone through this important and difficult decision.

Best Styles for Symmetrical Bodies

While that hourglass figure might be admired by dress designers and women around the world, sometimes finding clothes that fit is less of a dream. The hourglass has wide hips, shoulders, and a typically inward-angled midriff.

Emphasis on the waist is the best way to compliment these body types. Since curvy bodies tend to be well balanced, a similar dress is most effective. Explore styles of full-length gown and evening dresses to best bring out natural curves. Seek styles with sashes, belts, and other eye-catching details that bisect the symmetry of the hourglass shape.

Best Styles for Asymmetrical Bodies

Fitting for angular bodies can sometimes feel like a challenge. Whether you’re an upright triangle or an inverted triangle, there are many complimentary looks. The underlying idea to emphasize the areas that a frame type inherently doesn’t. Inverted triangles have broad shoulders and shallow hips, whereas regular triangles have broad hips and thin shoulders.

The best dress for each flips the emphasis onto the lighter areas of each frame, thus creating a more symmetric look. Hip-light people should explore cocktail dresses or gowns with leg slits to create contrast between their natural skin tones and the color and texture of the dress.

Likewise, those with shallower shoulders best benefit from strapless dresses to let their shoulders speak for themselves. A matching top piece, blouse, or jacket is another way to help the upper half become distinguished from curvy hips.

Best Styles for Pillar Bodies

For those who don’t have flashy hips or broad shoulders, fear not. There are plenty of dresses that perfectly compliment the rectangles and ovals out there. When you don’t have many curves and angles of your own, find a dress that does. This is where creative expression really comes in; women with more willowy figures can create dramatic illusions by freely mixing all the other styles normally regulated to different shapes.

Try dresses with contrasting colors to add more movement and flow. Playful styles like Mac Duggal prom dresses are a perfect example how cuts and textures can be used to compliment any figure, including more subtle frames. Open shoulders, lighter straps, and leg slits allow the natural tone of the skin to stand out. Showy belts, midriffs, and collars also help to build in texture and shape for a thinner frame. Pillar bodies can easily pull off cocktail dresses and gowns alike so long as the dress has enough details and stylizing to properly compliment the wearer’s form.