What’s your Kibbe type?
David Kibbe is hardly surprised that his method for enhancing one’s beauty has stood the test of time. “There’s nothing like this, and there never has been,” he said.
An image consultant trained in the 1980s era of beauty classifications, where every woman had a “season” and knew her face shape, he created the Kibbe body-typing system as a corrective to what he called “fear-based” style advice that told women they needed to minimize their features.
He aimed to help women understand and embrace their silhouettes, which he’d categorized into 13 types. He used aspirational language to emphasize the beauty of each body type.
In the ’80s and ’90s, the Kibbe system was, if not groundbreaking, a welcome rubric for dressing. But today, the book in which he codified his system, “David Kibbe’s Metamorphosis: Discover Your Image Identity and Dazzle as Only You Can,” is out of print and almost impossible to find. (The cheapest copy on Amazon is listed at $388.47.) The advice shared in online excerpts feels dated: “Dramatic” body types are advised that “shoulder pads are essential in every garment you own, without exception,” and “romantics” are encouraged to buy “elegantly slim briefcases.”
Despite all this, the Kibbe method has been gaining traction with a
new, digital audience. On TikTok, videos tagged #kibbebodytypes draw hundreds of thousands of views. The Kibbe forum on Reddit has grown from fewer than 5,000 members in early 2020 to more than 45,000.
In beauty-focused corners of the internet, you may find someone identifying as a “flamboyant natural” looking for advice on dressing her “blunt” bone structure, or a video analyzing the “Euphoria” star Alexa Demie’s “yin” and “yang” balance. There’s also an array of online quizzes that aim to elucidate one’s type.
Growing up in a small town in Missouri, Kibbe, 66, was fascinated by screen divas like Vivien Leigh and Katharine Hepburn, who helped form the basis of his bodytype schema.
The Kibbe system relies on Old Hollywood archetypes and a balance between what he calls “yin” (softness, curve) and “yang” (sharp angles, edges). If you’re all yang — tall and lean with sharp shoulders, like Katharine Hepburn — you could be a dramatic. If you’re all yin, with soft curves like Marilyn Monroe, you’re probably a romantic.
Naturals (yang-dominant but “blunt” rather than sharp, often with broad shoulders, like a ’90s supermodel), classics (think Grace Kelly) and gamines (petite and high-contrast) are somewhere
in the middle. The types are modified using adjectives like “soft” (Sophia Loren is a soft dramatic, for instance) or “flamboyant” (Audrey Hepburn, a flamboyant gamine). For each one, there is a set of guidelines on how to dress to look one’s best.
“Glamour is an important thing,” Kibbe said. “It’s appealing. And everyone wants to be appealing.”
The various types illustrate a slightly more expansive notion of beauty than is often presented in women’s magazines, where even today tall, lean women remain the standard. However, the specificity and complexity of Kibbe typing can prompt women to obsessively analyze their appearance. And because of the original system’s reliance on thin, white actresses, many popular online illustrations of the 13 Kibbe types are lacking in diversity.
Kibbe is happy to see his work reaching an online audience. He is ambivalent, however, about the emphasis and urgency most online communities place on finding one’s type. He sees his system as a journey best suited to the one-on-one consulting sessions that still make up the bulk of his business.
“The image identities are like the country you live in, but you’re an individual, a city or neighborhood in that country,” he said. Beauty, he added, “comes from individuality.”