Archive of ‘Dressing Your Truth’ category

Why Did I Return to DYT?

Of course, the last post on this blog before my unintentional hiatus was Why I Stopped Dressing My Truth, Part 2. And of course I stopped, because what I thought was my Truth was not my truth–the post before that was perfectly 4/1 and I was talking about disobeying my recommendations.

So I left DYT because I was tired of trying to fit myself into Type 3, where the jewelry was too big and the clothes were too textured and heavy. I think some people do find that DYT just does not work for them, but in my case, it wasn’t working because I had placed myself incorrectly within the system. Once I realized that, though, it was like getting everything back that I loved after years of thinking that I just wasn’t bright enough to handle black and white and pure colors.

This began to change a little when I realized that all of David Kibbe’s palettes go pretty bright. He doesn’t seem to be much of a fan of things in the Soft range. Accepting David’s view of color, I gave myself permission to go brighter, especially as even DYT T3 seemed to be moving in a more vivid direction.

I pretty much rejected T3 style but kept the T3 colors, thinking of it as a four-season Autumn. But once I realized I was 4/1, it was basically just giving a name to what I was doing already, and giving myself permission to add black and white to my wardrobe, as well as some colors like non-peacock blue.

I don’t think that I would get black from David–only Winters get black in his world, and his Winters are very cool and high contrast. But I’m still enjoying allowing myself to express myself using the T4 palette, and I find that keeping 4/1 helps me get my FG yin/yang balance correct. Like many Gamines, I have a tendency to go entirely to the yang side, and T1 reminds me to add back in more yin.

Besides Kibbe, the only stylist I’d want to go see is David Zyla, but that is forever a puzzle to me. For now, using 4/1 to inform my FG expression feels right to me.

How have you found working with DYT, if you use it? Does it work with your other style system discoveries?

Finally Revealing My Truth: Why Did It Take Me So Long to See It?

It’s shocking to me that it took me so long to see that I was T4. I have heard from others who know me that it was fairly obvious. So why couldn’t I see it? I fell into some common traps.

1) Thinking I wasn’t perfect enough for T4.
Many T4s fall into this trap: our perfecting nature makes it so that we have a hard time seeing ourselves in T4’s symmetry and perfect posture, and/or feel like we don’t hit all the checkboxes. I don’t have perfect posture. Like anyone else, I can see where I have asymmetry in my face. My nose has long been a sore point for me in terms of my appearance, and when I read “lump of clay” for T3, I felt like I couldn’t be anything else in the system, especially not the “perfect” type.

2) Confusing “still + upward” with “push forward.”
T4s and T3s can both have what is considered to be a “strong” personality. I am definitely a bold person, and the S1 makes me a little more high energy than, say, a 4/2. Things that I had thought were an indicator of T3 actually were an indicator of being T4 and being my own authority and not being afraid to express my opinion.

There were a lot of things that should have clued me in:

1) My childhood behavior.
No one would have ever called me an “active” child. I was very still–you could place me in a chair and I would stay there, observing the world. I didn’t talk much. I enjoyed spending time alone, working on my own things. I didn’t have much use for other children. I never related to the ways that T3s are shamed as children because, well, I wasn’t that kid.

2) Never dressing T3.
Many people who have placed themselves in the wrong type will dress with all the other elements of their actual type, just in the colors of the type they think they are. My “T3” wardrobe was basically 4/1, just in the T3 colors. The T3 elements never felt right on me and never suited my taste–even when I would buy T3 jewelry from the DYT store, it would literally be too large for my ears or wrists, and I never took any of the clothes I bought from there out of the package.

So why didn’t I see these obvious things? I think it all goes back to #1: I just didn’t think I was “enough” for T4. I didn’t think my facial features would qualify. I had to see them from a different perspective (my license, with proper T4 hair because it worked better than T3 hair… another sign) in order to see myself as T4. And once I allowed myself to see myself as T4, I have been able to go back to what I love and what I feel expresses me. The Autumn colors never suited my personality, really. I am a bold person, and the clear, strong hues have always been what I have wanted to be in all of these systems.

Again, I don’t feel like I would drape into these colors in any of the color-based systems, but when everything is put together, it is what feels the most true to me. And in the end, I think that is what we all want: to feel like ourselves.

Finally Revealing My Truth

I teased this on the Facebook page months ago, and I have been silent ever since. There are several reasons for this. Some are logistical, since I moved across the country and started grad school. But I think also there is just a lot to reveal, and how much this shift has changed my perspective on what I do here and how I am present in life.

One thing that has not changed: my perspective on my Kibbe Image ID. I still believe that my yin/yang balance is Flamboyant Gamine, and it is the best description of my physicality and my “star quality.”

But there is another piece of how I identify that has been nearly as stable over the years that I have now decided was wrong. For many years, I have seen myself as a 3/4 in Dressing Your Truth. But I have never even really come close to dressing that way. It was always too heavy, too much. And when I joined the Facebook group, I could never shake the feeling that I just didn’t look like the people in the group. But I simply didn’t know where else I could fit.

I got my license at the end of June, and as I was looking at my photo, it was as if I were seeing my face for the first time. Suddenly I could see symmetry and parallel lines. And I realized that I was a Type Four with a Secondary One.

This is a common mistyping–it’s stillness with a push behind it. And it is not uncommon for Type 4s to not see themselves as “perfect enough” to be T4. I thought I wasn’t graceful enough; I thought that my nose was all wrong. But once I saw it, there it was.

This does, of course, render Dark Autumn, and Autumn in general, no longer relevant, if I really want to stick with DYT. I have enjoyed bringing black back into my wardrobe, and going for bold, saturated colors. Would I drape into these colors? Probably not. Do I feel like they express me better than something I may drape into? Yes.

I do feel like it is a relief to not have to think about how I would fit what I loved into T3. I can see that the way I have been dressing is 4/1 lines, just in T3 colors. And I can see that living my truth has been good for me, especially since I discovered it right before I started a brand new chapter in my life.

I could go on and on about this, but really, just look at this site! It is so T4 🙂

I am not looking for opinions, but if you have questions about my process, I will answer them here and on Facebook.

Why I Stopped Dressing My Truth, Part 2

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…Or did I start doing it, at least my definition of it?

In recent months, I’ve been moving away from stricter views of style. You can see that my first post on this subject, as well as in my posts about disobeying your recommendations and abandoning Sci\ART.

Some people may like having a very narrow outline of what they should wear, and having everything in their wardrobe coordinate. I see the appeal of this, and for a long time, I believed that this was the best way. But I feel like it’s started to feeling too constricting for me. It was taking the fun out of clothes. When I started my style journey, I pretty much only wore black and gray. I had no idea what colors looked good on me. Exploring all of these color and style systems has given me clarity, which in turn I now feel allows me to know how I can break the rules.

One of the problems with the stricter systems is that they can almost make you feel guilty for not following them. For instance, if I don’t dress as a Type Three, am I letting myself down because I’m not showing my “true” self? If I don’t want to wear shades and substance, is it giving the wrong impression about who I am?

As it so often happens, the answer came to me while reading Metamorphosis:

Since you don’t have Louis B. Mayer guiding you in developing your star quality, you’ve got to do it for yourself. Discovering your Image Identity is the first step, for it allows you to utilize everything you are–both physically and innately–so that you can integrate your essential uniqueness into your own total look.

Not only will you end perfectly coordinated, with all elements of your appearance working harmoniously and holistically, but you will also get to experience the fun, the excitement, and even the glamour of discovering how thrilling and fulfilling it is when your star quality is out in the open for everyone to see and appreciate. The most exciting part of your metamorphosis becomes the new way you experience yourself as you begin to glory and revel in your totally radiant being!

By putting your uniqueness on display, you allow the world to see that there is no one else exactly like you. You are also able to remember that fact yourself, which is not always easy to do. That’s what Metamorphosis is all about. We’re not transforming you into something that’s going to disappear when you slip out of your clothes or wash the makeup off your face and watch it slowly drain down the sink.

Your true special essence already exists. Your star quality is inside you this very instant as surely as the ability to take your next breath. All you need to do is discover it, acknowledge it, enhance it, allow it to be seen, and then simply sit back and experience the wonder that is you!

I’m putting so long an excerpt here because I think it really captures what I love so much about the way David Kibbe works, and what I think sometimes other people struggle with when they try to work out Kibbe’s system for themselves. You simply are who you are. I can’t make myself into a Marilyn Monroe type anymore than Marilyn could have turned herself into Audrey. It’s about embracing what you are, and letting go of what you’re not.

To some, letting go of who you are not means rejecting things based on color, or by following DYT’s principles. But being Dark Autumn didn’t feel like an essential part of who I was–it was simply a set of rules to follow. DYT didn’t feel like an expression of me. It seemed to just get in the way of who I was, with rules to follow that may reflect my heavy footplant, but that were not as good a representation of me as Flamboyant Gamine is.

For me, using my intuition to follow my yin/yang balance and enjoy being FG is the fullest expression of who I am and my truth.

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Why I Stopped Dressing My Truth

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Before I begin, I think some people who are really into DYT would say that I never did in the first place. And they may be right–I never went full-on on what would be a recognizable T3 look.

And there’s a couple of reasons for that. The first is that some of it just isn’t my style. I knew from past experience that some things wouldn’t flatter me, and some of it, I just don’t care for the aesthetic. The other is that some things, like the jewelry, are literally too big and heavy for me. I have tiny earlobes, small wrists. I have ordered a couple of pairs of studs from the DYT store, and they are always larger than I expected when I receive them. They show the earrings on a ear on the website, but my ears are just that much smaller.

I don’t think I’ve typed myself incorrectly. My movement is very Type 3. But T3 fashion doesn’t necessarily express what I want to express. While theoretically, it should be a looser framework into which you can inject your personal style, T3 generally looks earthier than I go.

Whenever I look at other systems, I have to say that I just always come back to Kibbe. Whatever else I’m thinking about with style at the time (and I’m writing about this right now for the new workbook), Flamboyant Gamine is always the sun that any other style system floats around. If a system isn’t compatible with FG, it isn’t going to work for me.

I tried to combine them for a while… judging both the yin/yang balance of an item on me and whether or not it fit the T3 keywords. But in the end, this just felt too stifling. In addition, my style has started to shift to where “edgy” has taken a less prominent role. So while I previously liked the edgy aspects of T3, it no longer feels like who I am. I could definitely not wear T3 jewelry, and I don’t want to cut my hair short in a T3 way; I like my current haircut, which is probably a 1/4 or a 4/1 cut.

I still really appreciate the self-exploration aspects of Energy Profiling. I just no longer feel like the aesthetic aspects of it fit who I am. I feel like Flamboyant Gamine expresses my essence really well, and I am happier dressing that way than I am when I try to add T3 into the mix.

For instance, this dress is on my list… there’s no way it would fit T3. But it would be a dress I would feel comfortable and confident in.

Martha Dress, Boden, $150

Martha Dress, Boden, $150

Have you tried Dressing Your Truth? Do you find that your energy type’s clothing suits you, or have you found that other style systems work better for you?

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Dressing Your Truth Is Now FREE

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On November 2nd, Carol Tuttle announced that Dressing Your Truth is now free.

What this means is that Dressing Your course videos are now free, and then for $49, you can purchase an optional Before & After Support Kit, which includes the four style guides, wallet-sized style guides, and Facebook group membership that you used to get when you bought the old course, and then the new pattern guides and a copy of It’s Just My Nature!. So basically, the videos are now accessible to all, and then the rest of the benefits of being a course owner are now available for half the price of the usual sale price of the course, which was $99.

I think DYT is one of the first systems many of us encounter when we first start looking into style systems. It has a large online community and corporation behind it. At the time I started studying these different systems, DYT looked a lot different, and while some of the essential elements of the system resonated with me, I have to say that the results did not. I recognized that I was a 3/4 pretty quickly, but I didn’t like T3 clothes, for the most part. I have to say that they have upped their style game across the board in recent years–even the color palette for T3 looks completely different than it did when I first found the system. And I have always enjoyed the video content they produce.

I’ve actually started using the T3 palette as my primary palette–it feels like restrictive than Dark Autumn, and easier to work with. And I don’t think that Flamboyant Gamine is wholly incompatible with T3; my T3 just looks different than the stereotype, and that’s totally fine. And since I am in a phase of life where I am really working on myself, that aspect of Carol’s work has been very helpful to me. I’ve even found things in Remembering Wholeness: A Personal Handbook for Thriving in the 21st Century that have been helpful to me, even though I’m not a religious person at all and this book has much more religion-based content than her other books.

Dressing Your Truth is a system that I think a lot of people find and then abandon once they discover things like Kibbe and Zyla, but there is definitely some good content in it. Are you going to take the course now that it’s free? Do you work Dressing Your Truth into your own style philosophy?

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Rethinking My Dressing Your Truth Secondary

While it’s not a system I’ve used consistently over my color and style journey–although I do feel they have upgraded in the style department recently–I figured out my Dressing Your Truth Energy Type relatively quickly. I’m a Type 3, active/reactive.

I’m an introvert in MBTI, though, and I figured that my secondary had to be an introverted Energy Type for this reason. So it was Type 2 or Type 4, and Type 4 was the obvious fit. A lot of my personality and behaviors are Type 4, although my movement is not.

But one thing I’ve seen as I’ve gone back to watching DYT videos is that facial features are super important to determining both your primary and your secondary Energy Type. And as much as I see Type 4 in my behavior, I don’t see it in my face at all. In addition to my Type 3 features (face shape, hairline, eyes, eyebrows, “lump-of-clay” nose), I have apple cheeks, fuller lips, and small, child-like hands. I had a real “a-ha” moment when I was looking at Carol Tuttle’s Facebook page and came across this post. I can see a lot of myself in this woman, and I have always felt like a bit of a fruad when I said I was a 3/4 because I just couldn’t see that 4 in my features.

Part of the purpose of your secondary is to work it into your style, and even while saying I was 3/4, I have definitely been dressing 3/1. When I buy things from the Type 3 store, I go for things that are more fun/animated and a little lighter in feel.

bag/earrings/shoes

Earrings from the DYT store.

For me, I suppose, considering myself 3/4 was more about how I act, versus what I would wear. I am interested to see if committing to dressing 3/1 will have an impact on my behavior or how I feel. I’m also curious whether it is possible to be an introvert in personality and be 3/1–it’s supposed to be the highest Energy combination.

I have been thinking about my introverted qualities, though, and as much as I like to sit at home and work on my projects, I actually do this in a pretty social way. I don’t just get wrapped up in a project–I have to talk about it with other people online. So maybe that’s my way of getting my Type 1 socializing in. And when I’m out with people, I do like to keep it fun and light. People are all different, and just because I don’t express my Type 1 secondary in the same way as another 3/1 doesn’t mean I’m not one.

Have you determined your secondary Energy Type? How do you see it expressed?

Can You Choose Your Season?

Getting your style type to work with your season is an important part of the workbook. A winter dressing one Kibbe type is going to be different from a summer dressing the same Kibbe type. I like to add more texture and tend to do less high contrast than a Bright or True Winter FG, for instance.

There was a discussion on the Kibbe group I co-admin recently, however, that got me thinking about this in a different way. Can our lines themselves affect what season works for us? Do our tastes and personality affect it, as in what feels authentic to us?

Some suggested that while one color may be flattering in the heavier fabric analysts use to drape, but if you’re a type with lighter-weight fabrics, other colors may work better when in the right fabric.

Then there are all the women who were draped one season and then received a vastly different palette from David Zyla or Beauty Valued. While some people receive pretty much the same palette from all the analysts they visit, some seem more like chameleons, with the ability to somehow wear both Bright Winter and something that would probably harmonize best with Soft Autumn–and look great in both.

So what do you do if you get wildly varying palettes? I think you could go with what feels authentic to you. If you like what Zyla (for example) gave you and you feel good in it, I think it’s fine to center your wardrobe around that.

Or you could use different seasons for different occasions. Use your darker/cooler/brighter season for Level Three looks for higher contrast and more drama. Plus, you’re not liable to mix these clothes in with your lower levels, so your wardrobe will still coordinate nicely.

The idea of choosing your palette brings to mind Dressing Your Truth. In this case, the vibe you want to give off, which is supposed to match your dominant energy, will be expressed by line and color. I know I look terrible in white and the colors that would be given to a Type 1. Do I look terrible in them because they’re just the wrong colors for me–or because they conflict with my energy?

I think I would be a 3/4 in DYT, and the palette I chose for myself, coincidentally, is Dark Autumn. I chose Dark Autumn, however, because I felt like it looked the best on me. But perhaps that’s so because it feels the most like me. If I were draped, however, and the analyst said that another palette looked better on me and I agreed, I would switch out my wardrobe.

In the end, I think we do have to make a conscious choice to whether we are going to dress in the palette and/or style we receive from an analyst. We have to decide whether this is the appearance that we want to project. So while I don’t think anyone gets free reign to just choose whichever palette they want–you still have to consider how you actually look in it–most people seem to have a bit of wiggle room and can consider which version of themselves communicates their style the best.

What has your experience been? Have you received wildly different palettes from different analysts?

Kibbe vs. Dressing Your Truth

Most of us who have delved into style systems deep enough to end up getting into a system from thirty years ago like Kibbe has undoubtedly come across many different style systems. One of the most popular today seems to be Dressing Your Truth, which is a Four Types-based system. Before I start talking about, I have to say two things. One, I haven’t bought the course and have only read Carol Tuttle’s books and watched her YouTube videos. So I don’t know the exact recommendations you get once you shell out the $99-$297 for the course, but I feel like I get the general idea. Two, I think it’s important to understand some criticism of DYT, which include not giving sources and some customer service issues. I still find DYT helpful, though, because the materials are much more accessible than the older Four Type systems, and I think it’s good for understanding your inner yin/yang balance and how it can potentially influence your style.

With that out of the way, one of the issues that many people come across is that things don’t always match up. Once you’ve typed yourself in all of these systems, your various types may not be all that compatible. For instance, I’m a Light Spring in 12-color systems, a likely Soft Natural, and a Type 3 in Dressing Your Truth. Light Spring and Soft Natural work pretty well together, but Type 3 in Dressing Your Truth wears shaded colors, colors that have had black added. This is basically as incompatible with Light Spring as you can get, which is as light as you can get and would be compatible with Type 1 energy.

Then there’s Kibbe. I realized that Kibbe’s recommendations are based on yin/yang balance and contrast/blended, and Carol’s are based on yin/yang balance and high/low energy. “Contrast” and “Energy are basically referring to the same thing, right? So I took a graph showing the exact location of Kibbe Image Identities on a graph and overlaid the DYT type, thinking that the influence of balance of your non-primary energies of DYT would pull you into a certain direction of yin/yang and energy balance on the graph and you would find the Kibbe compatible with your DYT type that way. (I found the original graph on Pinterest and I tried finding the original site, but they were all linked to the image file on Pinterest and not a website. So if this is your graph, please let me know if you want me to take this down or give you credit. I have my own graph, but it doesn’t illustrate what I’m talking about as well.)

graph-dyt2

So as a 3/4 with 1 being a strong tertiary, I figured I’d end up in on the far left portion of Soft Dramatic. I hope this makes sense. But of course, I’m pretty sure now I’m an SN, which is in the opposite quadrant. The other issue with this chart is that, despite the fact that Carol presents the Energies this way visually, the movement levels of the types next to each other on the X-axis are not equal. The movements go 1, 3, 2, 4, from highest to lowest. So I guess you could say Type 1 is Yin Highest Movement, or SG; Type 3 is Yang High Movement, or D/SD; Type 2 is Yin Low Movement, or SN/SC; and Type 4 is Yang Lowest Movemnent, or DC. These kind of seem to work, if you look at the recommendations for the types, but there are, of course, four other Kibbe Image Identities to consider that then wouldn’t be included in Dressing Your Truth at all.

More importantly, when I posted this image on Seasonal Color, it was pointed out to me that Kibbe is mainly focused on the lines of the body, and Dressing Your Truth on your inner expression. A Dressing Your Truth purist would insist that your inner energy movement would trump all. So I, as a Type 3 Light Spring Soft Natural (if I am in fact a Soft Natural, which I’m not sure of yet), should forget about the light-yet-bright colors of Light Spring and the softer lines of Soft Natural, and just dress with the sharp lines and heavy autumnal colors of Type 3, since that’s what my inner energy requires.

I am not, of course, a Dressing Your Truth purist, if you couldn’t tell from the fact that none of my blog posts have focused on DYT thus far. But I do think it’s important to understand how your inner self can affect your Image Identity. Kibbe does, after all, dress people within the same type differently. People fall in different places on the continuum. You may find that if you have a yang DYT type and you’re a yin Kibbe, you may want to look for inspiration in accessories or prints in the yang version of your type. If you’re a Type 4 and a Light Summer, try using the purest colors your palette has. If you’re a Type 1 Soft Classic, look for things that are a little more “fun” than the usual Soft Classic might wear. And so on.

This is only one way of looking at this issue of conflicting seasons and types and identities, but I think it could be a useful tool for those of us feeling overwhelmed by all of this information. Have you experienced a mismatch between your various types?

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