Which stripes are right for my body?
Horizontal stripes? On a tube dress? Is there any greater recipe for disaster?
And yet there Rachel Weisz was, looking radiant in one this week. OK, she’s pregnant, 48 and married to James Bond, which must foster radianthelpful hormones.
And then there were all those maxi-stripy tube cardigans I saw languishing on the rail of Marni in the Bicester Village shopping outlet this week. A sign identified them as part of the
SS18 collection, presumably to encourage brisk trade. Generally, merchandise at Bicester is a year old. Summer 2017 is on the floors now, and if you’re a strategic, canny shopper who knows a keeper from an ephemeral trend on the way down, that’s fine.
Those current season stripes tell you that even the fashionable customer is running stripy-tube-dress
scared. And yet, they look so tempting, don’t they? A pattern that’s graphic not twee, spicy colours rather than sickly – a slim, stretchy, simple shape that works under numerous layers.
This much I know from wearing multi-coloured stripy jumpers – the knit should be supple but also hold you in a little, otherwise it bags and ruins the quasi-sporty, streamlined effect. Then there’s the placement of your stripes. Me+em (they must spend their entire time dreaming up ways to boost the flattering properties of classics), thought long and hard about the colour sequencing of their stripy tube dresses, placing the darker, narrower stripes across the tummy to slim it. “I had a stripy designer version last year,” says founder Clare Hornby, and they’d put the white stripe across the stomach…”
The Me+em stripy tube dress is flying – and not just because all the staff have bought it. “We’ve sold it to lots of pregnant women and I saw a lady at Hamilton wearing it a couple of weeks ago who was maybe a size 15 and about 60. It’s had an incredibly low returns rate,” says Hornby.
If you’re thinking you need to be pregnant or voluptuous to wear it, Hornby is a wraith, and says it’s popular with all sizes. The stripy tube dress: not about size but attitude.