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Posts Tagged ‘soft gamine’

Kibbe's Metamorphosis, My Kibbe Journey, Personal | 5 Comments

A New Chapter in My Kibbe Journey, Part Two

In my last post, I mentioned that David had reached out to me and offered his guidance. Of course, I took him up on this generous offer! After some back and forth, he let me know that he could really only see two potential IDs for me based on my physicality: Soft Classic or Soft Gamine. And based on everything he knew about me, he thought that Soft Gamine would be the more likely of the two. Also, I definitely had Double Curve!

(Caveat: David doesn’t type people online. I would still have to see him in person for a 100% confirmation. And the best way to find your ID if you can’t make it to NYC is still to do the exercises in Strictly Kibbe. I’m not saying they didn’t work for me–they did get me to a place where I saw I was much more yin than I had wanted to admit to myself. David just saw that he could help me more directly.)

Once I started rereading the SG section, it made a lot of sense, both why I was a Soft Gamine and why I had yin resistance and wanted to be more yang. Soft Gamine has very yang energy, which is why I was so drawn to yang angularity, despite having a more rounded body and apple cheeks. This quote in the Soft Gamine makeover writeup in the book resonated with me:

Heidi was afflicted with what I’ve come to call the “Soft Gamine syndrome.” How does one integrate an outer physicality that clearly spells adorable, doll-like and bubbly, with an inner spirit that is filled with drive, spunk, energy and ambition?

I can see how I embody these contradictions. Even at 36, I feel like I still appear cute and youthful–but I am also known for having a strong personality and being very driven. I love this scene from The Golden Girls where Betty White flips from sweet and innocent to “don’t mess with me” in no time at all:

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is how when I first came across Kibbe, I believe that Soft Gamine was my first instinct. I do think that if someone just sits and reads the whole book, without looking at anything on Pinterest or asking people on various forums for their opinions or watching YouTube videos, most people will land in the right place. I had lived as myself for long enough to know, in my heart of hearts, that I didn’t really have the straight, more yang body of a Flamboyant Gamine. But the way Soft Gamine was portrayed on the Internet was so girly, so ingenue. It didn’t really feel like it was something I could inhabit and still honor my yang energy.

But I have a better understanding of what Soft Gamine actually can look like now that David is invovled in the community. I am still working on developing my personal Soft Gamine look, and it is a challenge in our current fashion times. It is hard to find clothes with a precise fit that have a lot of design details. I have started putting together a Pinterest board with looks from Soft Gamine celebrities. Right now, this look from Eartha Kitt feels like akin to what I could see my everyday style as being:

Eartha Kitt

I hope that the fact that I decided to revisit my assumed Kibbe Image Identity after eight years will help others give themselves permission to question and explore if where they have placed themselves doesn’t feel right. Here I was, eight years in, the co-founder of what is regarded as the official Kibbe community, helping other people on their journey–and I couldn’t type myself correctly?! I could have seen it as something that would undermine my credibility. But instead, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. It has helped others gain clarity on their own place in the system too.

What do I hope people take away from my experience?

It’s okay to be wrong.
I think every time I have mistyped myself in a system, it’s been what I needed at the time. I experienced it with typing myself as Type 4, and I think it’s the case here as well. I may have just needed that time leaning into my yang side in FG in order to be ready to accept my more yin side. And it doesn’t mean you were clueless about the system you’re working with–it can be easier to see others than to see yourself. True, there were things that David clarified that helped things fall into place for me, and I now am able to use this information to do a better job helping others, but having additional information now doesn’t mean that I wasn’t doing the best I could with the information I had.

Don’t let the sunk-cost fallacy keep you where you know you don’t belong.
Yes, you may have spent time, money, and energy on adapting your wardrobe and your mindset to a certain type. But if you know it’s not the right fit, don’t let those things keep you there and spend more time, money, and energy on the wrong things. You can start fresh. And as I said above, the past wasn’t a waste; it got you where you are today.

What is right may not be comfortable.
I think for a lot of us, there is a kind of contradiction inherent to our relationship to our Kibbe Image ID–it resonates, but it also dredges things up. I don’t really have much of the yin resistance that he outlines in the book, but for me it was more of a lack of attraction towards a more yin aesthetic in general. Yin was uncomfortable because I wasn’t sure how I could incorporate more yin and achieve a style that felt true to my inner self. I am still trying to work this out, and I’m even revisiting my stack in Personality Squared. Does Sporty, Edgy, and Playful still fit? I am finding myself being less attracted to yang than I was, knowing now that I need more yin in my style. It is definitely a work in progress.

And in the end, I could go see David and I could be a Soft Classic after all. But that would be okay too. It would just get me that much closer to where I want to be with the image I create for myself.

Flamboyant Gamine, Kibbe's Metamorphosis, Soft Gamine | 17 Comments

Flamboyant Gamine “Curves”

This is basically more or less on the same subject as my last post, but I thought it was important to give it a separate post because of my other posts on the subject.

To recap, before, I thought that, if you were curvy, the difference between Flamboyant Gamine and Soft Gamine was in the face. I think you’ll still see a difference in the face, but there’s a difference in the body, too.

The SGs and the FGs have a much more similar shape than we usually think of them as having. The main difference seems to be that FG will have angles and an SG will have a curve.

Let’s look at Brigitte Bardot (SG) and Audrey Hepburn (FG). Brigitte’s measurements at one point in her career, according to this website, were 36-20-35. Audrey’s were 34-20-34. So relatively similar–Audrey is technically an hourglass, and Brigitte was a slightly top-heavy hourglass and just a little bit curvier by the numbers.

alittleblackdress3
(Source)

Their shapes are incredibly similar… yet it’s clearly evident that the extra Romantic in SG has given a little bit of a curvy shape, and the extra Dramatic in FG has resulted in a shape composed entirely of angles.

SG’s curve is not as dramatically curved as a Romantic’s, such as Elizabeth Taylor (36-21-36, so not too far off from our G women above). But you can still see the curve vs. angularity in FG.
annex_-_taylor_elizabeth_18
(Source)

So what makes a “curvy” FG instead of a Soft Gamine? Angles instead of curves. I think you’d still be able to tell from the face, but it may be easier to see in body shape.

Kibbe's Metamorphosis, Soft Gamine | 0 comment

Kibbe Style Stereotypes

If you don’t have the physical copy of Metamorphosis and haven’t ever seen the pictures from the book, look at the image below. What type do you think this is?
photo (50)
A monochromatic look? No line break? Maybe it’s some kind of classic, or even a dramatic.

Nope. It’s the Soft Gamine makeover from the book. You may be asking, “But where is the line break? Where are the cute details and the Peter Pan collar?” It doesn’t fit in with the popular image of Soft Gamine at all. But it has crisp details (the shoulders), interesting accessories (big red bead necklace, little gloves), and there is, in fact, a line break. It does not obey the popular rule for short women that you should have your hosiery and your shoe be the same color to create the illusion of a longer leg.

Kibbe himself, according to people who have seen him in person, seems to go back and forth on how useful the book is. Some he tells to ignore the book, some he tells to read it. But while the recommendations can be outdated (I don’t buy sweaters with shoulder pads!), I still find that the recommendations are very useful. It helps you understand the parameters of your type that you can do then use to create your own unique style.

What I would definitely avoid doing, and I think I have mentioned this before, is relying on Pinterest and Polyvore to get an idea of the way your type should use their lines. Even with my own Pinterest, I’m not entirely satisfied with how I represent the types, because I feel like I know my own type the best and the rest I usually just repin from other people. We end up with stereotypes like Soft Gamine=Ingenue and that Soft Natural=Boho. People who come back from Kibbe with these types assigned to them do not end up dressed how the type is generally represented at all.

I think that we tend to look at the types with a point of view that is too narrow. While there is debate in the Kibbe community right now about whether the book has any use at all, I think it’s still the best resource for understanding your type and the lines that it requires. Anybody else’s interpretation should only be considered once you have gotten to know your type well, and when you know what works or what doesn’t.

Gamine, Ingenue, Kibbe's Metamorphosis, McJimsey, Soft Gamine | 24 Comments

Soft Gamine vs. Ingenue

One of the notable things about Kibbe’s system is that it lacks the Ingenue category. If you look at the quiz, A answers are Dramatic, B are Natural, C is Classic, E is Romantic, and mixed A and E is Gamine. But he does not mention Ingenue, nor what the D category means, at all. The D answers correlate to the Ingenue answers for systems that do have this category. As someone for whom D answers predominate on the Kibbe test, this is something I have thought about a lot. I have seen D-dominate people be categorized as Soft Dramatic, Soft Natural, Soft Classic, Soft Gamine, and Theatrical Romantic. I am still more or less trying to decide between those five.

What to do with your D, however, is a topic for another day, one I’ll cover when I feel like I’ve figured myself out. What I want to discuss today is how Soft Gamine often gets conflated with Ingenue, and how they are, in fact, not the same, and shouldn’t be used synonymously. Kibbe himself has apparently said that no adult woman should dress as an Ingenue. Many of the modern interpretations of Soft Gamine that you’ll find on Pinterest and Polyvore, however, retain the sort of cuteness and innocence that you’ll find in Ingenue, and many people do, in fact, name their boards or sets “Soft Gamine/Ingenue.”

I think it’s important here to clarify the major difference between Soft Gamine and Ingenue, and that is the amount of yin. In McJimsey’s interpretation, the Ingenue is the polar opposite of Dramatic. In Kibbe, I would say that the polar opposite of Soft Gamine would actually be Dramatic Classic, since it has the opposite ratio of yin/yang and is blended (see my chart here to see what I mean). In Kibbe, Romantic takes the place of being the opposite of Dramatic, so I suppose that if Ingenue were even on the scale, it’d be off-the-charts yin.

Kibbe’s system also does not change with age. In McJimsey, and Carole Jackson’s Color Me Beautiful, a Gamine or an Ingenue will eventually mature into a Classic or a Natural (in a Gamine’s case) or a Romantic (in an Ingenue’s case). I think Kibbe’s system only really works for adult women, and being a Gamine is not something you age out of. Betty White, as a Soft Gamine, is a perfect example of this, I think. At 92, she still has the Gamine joie de vivre:
BettyWhite1
(Source)

Soft Gamines are yin in size, yin in flesh, slightly yang in bone structure, with yang drive and charisma and yin charm. This is a far cry from McJimsey’s “artless and naive” Ingenue. A Soft Gamine is a force to be reckoned with. While there are some recommendations–peplums, bolero jackets, bouffant skirts–that can apply to both, a Soft Gamine does not need the ruffles and daintiness that an Ingenue does. A Soft Gamine is a grown-ass woman.

There’s a reason why Kibbe’s prime Soft Gamine example is Bette Davis:
bette-davis-blonde
(Source)

It’s because Soft Gamines are awesome. So let’s give these Soft Gamine Betty(e)s some respect, and stop confusing “Soft Gamine” and “Ingenue.”