Working With Patterns & Prints
Over a hundred years ago, during World War I, the U.S. Military and its Allies initiated a program of experimental camouflage they called “Razzle Dazzle” or just “Dazzle.” It was pretty amazing stuff.
Enormous ships, tanks and aircraft were painted with an extraordinary array of lightning bolts, zigs & zags, splashes, stripes, polka-dots, stars and even flowers, in a full spectrum of brilliant colors. Each of these weapons of war was hand painted differently.
The program was continued even into World War II, when it was abandoned. Not because it didn’t succeed, it did.
It deceived the eye as to the nature and perimeters of the object it was observing. It was discontinued because all of the hand painting and creative design was too expensive and time consuming.
“Well, that’s interesting, Gabrielle,” you might be thinking. “But why are you telling me this?”
I’m telling you this story to give you an idea of how powerful patterns and prints are in determining how people perceive what they’re seeing when they look at you.
If a battleship at sea can confuse observers with a series of stars, slashes and roses, imagine what carefully chosen motifs can do for your rear end!
In lay terms, this is (kind of) how it works. Even in the average back yard, there is so much to see that the brain could quickly become overwhelmed. So the eye takes it in, but the brain breaks it down into a kind of shorthand.
Many of the most common things are literally overlooked. You would say you didn’t “notice” something familiar that was right in front of you. Your brain had cast it aside as unimportant, previously identified or confusing.
When at first glance, the eye encounters something it can’t readily understand, it goes to the center of the object and tries to identify the shape. If it doesn’t recognize the shape, it moves on to examine other parts of the object. This all happens in literally the blink of an eye.
We all know that vertical stripes make things look longer or taller and horizontal stripes make them look wider or shorter. But that’s only the beginning of how you can use patterns to direct the eye of an observer into seeing what you want it to see or ignore what you don’t want it to see.
If you think about it, you’d probably say that a standard half-inch (1.2 cm) vertical stripe can take as much as 6 or 7 lbs (2.72 or 3.17 kg) off of your perceived weight. However, if the parallel vertical stripes are wavy the effect is enhanced because you’ve given the eye another element to deal with. And a broken stripe (something like a pattern of sticks) is even more confusing to the eye.
Many of you may already know that dark colors make you look smaller and light colors make you look larger. But do you know why? It’s because dark colors appear to be receding and receding objects look smaller to the eye than lighter colors which appear to be advancing. Obviously, the eye would perceive an advancing object as more significant than a receding object, thus, giving it more weight. (And that only appears to be an awful pun.}
Regular checks and plaids are quite flattering to most figures, but if you turn them on the diagonal (harlequin), once again, your perceived weight declines because the eye likes to move up and down or side to side. If you cause it to move on the diagonal, it kind of gives up, stops trying to define the shape in its usual terms and moves on to other features of the object.
A medium-sized houndstooth check can have the same effect because the movement of the pattern is diagonal. However, if the houndstooth is too small, the effect disappears. The eye treats it as a solid. If it’s too large, it loses its diagonal movement as each motif becomes an object in its own right.
I love polka-dots. They have the same flattering effect as, say, a floral. But I recently saw a dark polka-dot print with pink roses scattered throughout. This print would prevent the eye from settling on the polka-dot pattern and moving on to examine the edges of the shape (i.e., the height and width of your body).
The same would apply to, say, stripes with random flowers or other objects such as balls or stars. They all break up an otherwise easily discernible pattern and cause the eye to move up to the face.
Color can play the game, too. Let’s take a black & white stripe or grid pattern. The eye would quickly perceive what was going on here and move on to define the edges. But if you add a random primary colored stripe (red, blue, yellow or even green or purple), it causes the eye to skip around and then move on to something more easily defined, like a face.
So, the idea becomes one of confusing the eye and preventing it from identifying the size and nature of the shape. The eye always looks for a shape. Your job is to prevent it from finding one so it will abandon the effort and move up to your face.
This works with any kind of figure dissatisfaction - if you’re carrying extra weight or if you think you’re too thin, or too curvy or too straight, flat or lumpy, you can cause the viewer’s eye to go straight to your face.
What we learn from those World War I Razzle Dazzle designers is that if you confuse the eye, you can prevent it from focusing clearly on a shape, calculating it’s contours and identifying it - whether it’s a battle ship or your slightly over-weight, under-weight or otherwise unsatisfactory body.
To summarize, vertical patterns, like stripes, will help you look taller and leaner.
\
Horizontal patterns, like horizontal stripes, will make you look shorter and wider.
Dark colors appear to recede and receding objects look smaller than light colored objects which appear to advance.
Random motifs and diagonal patterns help distract the eye and cause it to raise to the face. Random motifs combined with vertical or diagonal patterns will help you the most because they do both.
Next week I’ll talk about the “Why?“ of all the effort we put into hair, make-up and fashion.
- Gabrielle