If your blood boils when you see rules that tell you certain fashion trends are off limits because of your proportions, then you’ll appreciate this take on the tired instruction: “How to dress for your body type”.
Oonagh Keating, from Liverpool, saw an image telling women how to dress for their body shape and instinctively wanted to “make a joke out of it”, so she made one adjustment and shared it on Twitter.
Her revised image quickly racked up nearly 36,000 retweets and more than 50,000 likes.
Whether or not your body is represented by any of the images above, there is just onepiece of advice that’s relevant: “Dress how you like. It’s your body.”
“I wanted to get across my opinion that, outside of the work sphere, how we dress should be totally up to the individual,” Keating told HuffPost UK.
She said she had noticed people around her were increasingly discussing their bodies shapes with a focus on making changes for the new year.
″When I was much younger, I felt bombarded by messages about how I should look; these were mainly from the print media,” she said.
“Now I’m middle-aged, there are more body-positive messages out there, but the balance is still tipped towards telling people how to look.”
Clearly, she is not alone in feeling this way as the response to her tweet has been “overwhelming”.
Keating joked on her Twitter that celebrities or those with large followings must have a Twitter “plus” account that doesn’t make their phone app crash when getting more than ten notifications.
But she has noticed that the replies have been mostly positive.
“Some people said they wished they’d been given that message when they were younger, and others shared similar items, including one aimed at men,” she said.
“I’d only mentioned women because that’s what I’ve seen, but all genders are subject to arbitrary rules about how to dress.
“While I understand that it can make people feel good to dress well, and I have no issue with that, I just felt I’ve seen too many preachy fashion tips in my lifetime.”