When stripes get stars!

FOR years mothers have told their daughters that horizontal stripes do the female figure no favours and that vertical ones are more flattering. As a result, many women have spent their lives avoiding horizontal hoops for fear of looking fat. So when Dr Peter Thompson, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of York, announced last year that horizontal stripes actually make you look thinner, many breathed a collective sigh of relief.

After all, horizontal stripes have become a perennial favourite in fashion collections. This season, designers including J Crew, Juicy Couture and Stella McCartney are showcasing stripes, while navy-and-white striped Breton tops are ubiquitous in High Street stores such as Zara and Gap.

Yet, just as we are poised to embrace nautical chic, free from the fear it could make us look like a ship in full sail, along comes Val Watham, winner of the BBC’s Amateur Scientist of the Year award, announcing that your mom was right all along: horizontal stripes do make you look fat.

She has based her findings on an experiment in which hundreds of people gave their verdicts on women wearing different outfits.

So what is the truth about stripes? The debate dates back to the 19th century, when German doctor and physicist narrow black stripes on a white background were most flattering – ideally when there was about 10 percent black to 90 percent white.

Thompson performed another set of experiments to try to show that his stripes theory held true on 3D objects. He took cylinders and covered them with horizontal or vertical lines and asked people to decide which looked wider. Again, the majority decided that the cylinders with the horizontal lines looked narrower. Conclusive proof, surely, that Von Helmholtz was right and women were wrong – sailor stripes ahoy! Or not…

Like a lot of women who’ve spent years agonising over what they look like, amateur scientist Val Watham, 53, is sceptical about Thompson’s findings.

“Using line drawings filled in with flat stripes doesn’t look like real people wearing real clothes,” she argues.

Similarly, cylinders with lines on them don’t look like people in clothes, either.

Val proposed a different experiment, showing people videos of different-sized models wearing identical clothes, either vertically striped, horizontally striped or of plain black material.

More than 500 people were asked to study the videos of the models wearing all three outfits, and the results showed that vertical stripes made people look taller, while horizontal stripes made them appear wider. – Daily Mail