Shapes and style

I like clothes. A lot. I'm not a fashionista but I thoroughly enjoy browsing clothes, planning and picking outfits and admiring the sartorial choices of others – my friends, strangers on the street, celebrities in magazine pages, actors on television. It's  fun. Obviously it's not earth-shatteringly significant, but, to my mind it injects some extra fun into everyday life.

At least it did for a long time. Then I had a baby and my relationship with clothes suffered. It's probably more apt to say it was my relationship with my body that faltered, but as I stood in the mirror trying to make clothes look right, it was the clothes I really started to hate.

Nothing in my own wardrobe fitted and nothing in the shops looked any good. I'd lost the ability to dress myself. Something that had previously been hugely enjoyable, became fraught and yuk. I didn't know what worked. It was the beginning of a new learning curve. Learning to dress curves.

For many years, thanks to an autoimmune disease, I was quite thin. As I set out attempting to master the art of dressing my slightly curvier frame I realised something. When you are thin most clothes will suit you. You might not pack the wow factor into a dress the way Christina Hendricks does but it will still fit and it will look quite ok. As far as dressing goes, thin is the ultimate handicap. Having very little flesh to arrange makes dressing a cinch. If something looks good on the hanger, it will almost certainly look good* on you.

The arrival of some additional flesh made me realise dressing a fuller frame is less straightforward. At this point I should say that I have a perfectly lovely body. I am far from Christina Hendricks's silhouette but it is also true that my body is distributed quite differently than it was for many years. I have consequently come to learn there are necklines to avoid, fabrics to shun, cuts to dismiss and flesh to disguise. It is an art I am far from mastering but I'm certainly getting better.

When it comes to clothes, shapes and style, I have a newfound and vast appreciation for women who dress well, who do not necessarily have the handicap of being thin. The ones without the limbs of Elle Macpherson or Gwyneth Paltrow's toning or Miranda Kerr's absent body fat. Who aren't perfectly proportioned or perfectly toned but look perfectly dressed regardless.

I will go so far as to say I now think the most stylish women in this universe are those that know their threads and know how to dress their body – lumps and all. They're the ones who stand out in a room. Because in my limited experience, dressing a few curves takes a lot more skill than dressing a frame sparse on body fat.

This is not to deride the style or bodies of those women whose tall, willowy, perfectly formed frames could make even paper bags look heavenly. Instead it is to applaud the women who don't have those genes on their side, but look divine anyway. It's an art I admire. I now find myself scanning the streets and magazines and cannot help seeking out the looks I love, on bodies that aren't as angular as others.

My own mum is one of the most consistently well-dressed women I know. I've always loved her style but it's only more recently that I have appreciated just how skilled she is. It's not just that she has a great eye, it's that she knows what works on her. She is a beautiful woman in great shape, but her shape does not happen to be straight up and down. I'm paying attention.

*By 'look good' I do not mean 'looking in peak physical form'. I have many photographs that prove it's possible for clothes to sit well despite the wearer being a few kilograms, and several shades of pallor, short of peak condition, looking decidedly 'ungood'. By 'look good' I mean, largely, most clothes will fit and flatter a thin frame.