My Kibbe Journey: Part 3.5

This is a follow up to my most recent post, because I feel like some interesting things were going on in the comments that I felt deserved post of their own.

I feel like I’m having a new Kibbe realization once every 48 hours. This is, I suppose, working with my own interpretation of Kibbe, because he is very right-brained/intuitive about it, and I want to plot everything on a graph. But that’s okay, because this is my blog and this is helping me to work stuff out. You don’t have to look at Kibbe the way I do if it’s not helpful for you.

Yesterday, I was reading about Twiggy and Audrey Hepburn, and how Twiggy is an FG with D influence and Audrey was an FG with Classic influence. Now, this does not mean that you don’t still fit into FG. You are still just the one category. But it can be helpful for those of us who are not Liza Minelli or Vivien Leigh or anyone else who is the prototypical celebrity for any given type.

Now, it’s pretty obvious I have some extra yin–I have yin flesh and I’m not boyishly straight, like you’d think of an FG as being. The only type in Kibbe where you have yin flesh and a yang face is actually SD.

Put me next to an SD, and it’s obvious that it’s not me. But if you look at a picture of Sophia Loren, I have what is basically a compact version of her body: very tapered ribcage and square hips matched by relatively broad shoulders:

Sophia Loren
(Source)

If you look at the chart of the logical progression of Kibbe types from yang to yin, contrast to blend, FG and SD are actually right next to each other. So instead of my extra yin coming from Soft Gamine, perhaps my extra yin is coming from a Soft Dramatic influence. Soft Dramatic is way too big on me, but perhaps I can add touches here and there. I would place myself where the red dot is:

map

I’ve long loved this Polyvore set by papillonnoir1:
2 winter kibbe gamines

The FG outfit is very much my style, and the skirt is drapey and asymmetrical in a way that seems to border on SD to me. Of course, I think SG peplums are also an option for me, but they seem to have disappeared from stores. So I think that keeping to FG’s rule of the first layer being narrow and cut close to the body, I am going to experiment with a little touches of SD draping as a way to highlight curves as an alternative to SG ways of highlighting curves.

5 Comments on My Kibbe Journey: Part 3.5

  1. ithinklikeme
    August 22, 2014 at 3:11 pm

    I really like where you’re going with this. As you know, I feel like I am on the fence between two similar types, as well, and have been trying to add a little extra yin to SD by keeping the T-shape primary, and adding a little extra waist definition/emphasis when things feel a little too billowy. I do think that it’s an important concept of “the most important thing” by trying to see what our most noticeable feature is. I have asked a few ppl in real life what’s the first thing that they think ppl notice about me, and they all said that it was my striking, exotic face (their words, not mine, lol).

    That would anchor me into the more Yang category as my primary type, even if I’m less fleshy than some other ppl within that same type. It would stand to reason that for me, TR outfits don’t look “bad” on me, but, I can push things into a Yangier direction without losing my balance, and that should indicate it’s where I belong. Adopting some of the yin details of the TR should not throw off my overall balance, either, as long as I stick to the main principles of line, b/c my face falls squarely into the descriptions of the SD face.

    In your case, you would not lose any of the balance of FG by adding an SD line/element here and there to flatter your shape, I’d think. I am supposing that this is b/c your broad, gamine face stands out most upon first look, and it is squarely within the FG guidelines.

    So it’s a bit of a multifaceted set of questions, right? There are conditions. If your face stood out strongly, but was kind of in between two descriptions as far as facial types go, you would have to adhere more strongly to the guidelines of whichever type was the best fit in order to keep the overall balance in the image. If, on the other hand, your yin body shape was the first thing people noticed about you, you’d look to the face for clues as to whether you could balance elements of a bordering type.

    This is all just me theorizing, and I may not even be making sense b/c my caffeine has yet to really kick in.:)

    Reply
    • stylesyntax
      August 22, 2014 at 8:00 pm

      I’m starting to wonder if it’s more like Dressing Your Truth than I had previously thought, where the face acts as the deciding factor, regardless of body lines, because it seems like it’s very important for the lines of the clothes to follow the lines of the face. Like I think my body might fit better in SG, which is why I thought I was SG before, but its curves don’t work with my face at all.

      I do think Kibbe seems to personalize the type for people this way, even if its more intuitive for him and he doesn’t picture it as a graph. It’s also been interesting to me to see how different people interpret the styles; some people in FG, I’ve noticed, go way into the traditional Gamine look of Breton shirts and oxfords, and generally they seem to be the people who would have been classified as plain Gamine in Kibbe’s original classification and have traditional gamine faces. Whereas for me, that classic French gamine style doesn’t work at all, because I need those geometrics. Classic in any form doesn’t work for the “baby SD” version of FG.

      Reply
  2. ithinklikeme
    August 23, 2014 at 8:51 pm

    This is interesting, and I think there’s something to it. I only noticed the importance of keeping with the lines in the face since I’ve started this Kibbe journey.

    I didn’t see it in the beginning when ppl pointed out how jewlelry with fine, broken lines didn’t work on me, but I’m starting to see it more and more.

    Reply
  3. Dianne
    February 5, 2015 at 1:34 am

    I have always meant to ask (- and you probably think this it is obvious) why is it that classic is not the center of the diagram? It makes the most sense to me that everything radiates out from a central balanced style.

    Reply
    • stylesyntax
      February 5, 2015 at 3:19 am

      It is at the bottom because it has the lowest amount of contrast, or animation/movement, which is what the y-axis represents. Gamine has the same amount of yin/yang, but it has the most amount of contrast, so it is at the top.

      Reply

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