Dress Your Best: The Complete Guide to Finding the Style That's Right for Your Body [Paperback]

Clinton Kelly (Author), Stacy London (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2005

The 8 million fans of TLC’s hottest show, What Not to Wear, know it as the place to go for real-life fashion advice. Now the show’s hosts, Clinton Kelly and Stacy London, offer spot-on fashion wisdom—with an attitude—in this fully illustrated, authoritative, and irreverent fashion guide to dressing your best for every occasion. Clinton and Stacy’s surefire method for boosting appearance rests on their belief that we can all win admiring glances by selecting clothes that play up our positives and create a balanced body shape. In Dress Your Best, Clinton and Stacy match a wide range of female and male body types with the perfect work, casual, and evening attire, showing you exactly how to make your best parts “work” for you.

Dressing tips for 26 body types!
Features 18 women and 8 men: bigger on top, bigger on bottom, a little extra in the middle, not curvy, extra curvy, small-framed, athletic, and more!

Whether you’re searching for a way to accentuate your assets, puzzling over the right print pattern for your frame, or just looking for a solution to the dilemma “What do I need to wear to look fabulous?” you’ll find here the universal tips, dos and don’ts, seasonal alternatives, and must-haves that will deliver the answers. Dress Your Best is certain to become the standard by which all other fashion guides are measured.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The spunky hosts of TLC's What to Wear present a fashion guide that's empowering, friendly and exceedingly useful. No gimmicky, fruit-related body shape names here—Kelly and London keep things simple. For each of their female body types—"bigger on top," "bigger on the bottom," "a little extra in the middle," "curvy," "not curvy," etc.—there's advice for petite, average height and tall women. (The men's section is equally straightforward if shorter: "tall," "athletic," "barrel-chested," etc.) Kelly and London use positive reinforcement (there are many more "dos" than "don'ts"), and sprinkle "universal tips" applicable to any body type throughout. Each type's section opens with a photo of an average-looking model sporting a basic swimsuit, along with comments from the model and the authors. Although they don't cite brand or store names, Kelly and London give plenty of specific advice: e.g., a straight dress will accentuate curves on an hourglass shape; a jacket with a moderately low "stance" (v-neck) will help the upper body appear longer. Ladies and gentlemen, start your shopping engines—and don't leave home without this book!
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The sweet yet knowledgeable and even assertive fashionistas who are the hosts of the hit cable TV show What Not to Wear set their precepts down in print in this delightfully upbeat and decidedly informative primer for both men and women. Their firm, understandable, and workable advice is underscored by their desire not to change anyone's body type--no preaching about dieting here--but simply to get people to understand their own body types and dress appropriately for the best effect. Kelly and London take 15 real women and 8 real men as "subjects," representing all types of bodies, from "bigger on top" to "barrel-chested," and with both illustrations and text, they suggest, for each subject, three outfits to wear for work, weekend, and evening. This book should be regarded as fun reading, not as a chore; the authors' approach to fashion is not as an arcane code capable of being grasped only by certain enlightened people. In their hands, fashion is not only about looking good but also about having a good time while doing so. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press; First Edition edition (September 13, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307236714
• ISBN-13: 978-0307236715
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (132 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,340 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #66 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Beauty & Fashion

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

384 of 396 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Far Superior to Trinny and Susannah's Book, September 20, 2005

By 

Hilary Miller (KY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dress Your Best: The Complete Guide to Finding the Style That's Right for Your Body (Paperback)

I'm a big fan of Clinton and Stacy's show on TLC, What Not to Wear, so when I saw that this book was coming out, I was eagerly expectant. Well, it was definitely worth the wait! This book is SO much better than the book What Not to Wear (by the hosts of the BBC series, Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine). Although both books are organized in similar fashion -- identifying certain body shapes (or, in What Not to Wear, certain "flaws") and showing what works for that type -- Dress Your Best does it far better. I don't know why Trinny and Susannah did all the modelling in their book, because they certainly don't represent every common body "flaw". Dress Your Best chose real-life women (and men) and put them in outfits that REALLY made the most of their body types. Some of the transformations were jaw-dropping!! I loved the way the book dressed the three "extra curvy" (AKA pretty darn chunky) women. Just like on the TV show, Stacy and Clinton focused on the positives in these women's appearances and encouraged them to feel good about themselves -- something that society doesn't often do. Another bonus was showing three outfits for each woman and man -- work, weekend, and evening. Plus, with very few exceptions, the clothes they chose were stunning. The same can not be said, in my opinion, for the clothes modelled by Trinni and Susannah. Oh, and did I mention that this book is laugh-aloud funny, just like the TV show? The repartee between Stacy and Clinton translates really well to the printed page. All in all, this book goes to the top of my list of recommended fashion books, right along with the Lucky Shopping Manual. Buy these two, and you will always be dressed your best!

132 of 136 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great, but could use improvemet, September 3, 2006

By 

J. Watkins (MD) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dress Your Best: The Complete Guide to Finding the Style That's Right for Your Body (Paperback)

Like many of the other reviewers, I love Stacy and Clinton's TV show, and it has helped me greatly in weeding out pieces in my wardrobe and buying new clothes to replace them. When I discovered that they had published a book, I rented it from the local library immediately. In a way, I am glad I rented it rather than purchasing it.

I liked how the book not only broke down different styles by body type, but also used REAL people to demonstrate those body types. It was really easy to flip through and find the different sections that applied to my body type. As always, the information they presented for each body type was great, and the styles are pretty much guaranteed to work well.

However, the book needed improvement in several areas. First of all, only six pages are dedicated to each body type, and while those six pages are informative, it would have been more helpful if they had given each type a few more styles and pointers. For example, in the "curvy" section, Stacy and Clinton recommend a skirt suit, which is great, but they didn't give any pointers for people who want to wear trousers occasionally. The book would have been greatly improved if they gave two or three different looks for work, weekend, and evening.

Secondly, their suggestions were kind of static, meaning they assumed everybody works at a place requiring suits and trousers, everybody goes out for the evening in a cocktail dress, etc. Essentially, they did not make any attempt to curtain their wardrobe selections to individual life-styles. When they list at the front the "essential" pieces for a wardrobe, I found that several of them were really rather obsolete for me. I never go places where I need "evening" attire, for example. THE LUCKY SHOPPING MANUAL succeeds better in this respect because they give you alternatives and allow you to choose more or less of certain pieces for your needs.

Lastly, Stacy and Clinton have a habit of emphasizing the "quality over quantity" line, which does not always work out. Sometimes, people need to build a wardrobe from scratch on a budget, and spending 150 dollars on a cashmere sweater does not factor in. Also, not everything you buy really needs to be high "quality," which is something else the LUCKY manual emphasizes.

Overall, I highly recommend picking up the book from your library, jotting down notes that apply to you, and then as a supplement picking up the LUCKY manual. Grade: B-/B.

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 4.5 stars for the style gurus..., September 27, 2006

By 

I. Gutierrez "bookjanybunny" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dress Your Best: The Complete Guide to Finding the Style That's Right for Your Body (Paperback)

Let me start by saying that this is based on a show that I love but I put off buying this book because I wasn't really sure what to expect from it, especially when quite a few of the reviews said that only a few pages were devoted to each body type and so forth. Well yes, only a few pages were devoted to each type, but there were A LOT of types portrayed (more so than in any other book of this kind I'd ever seen before), and multiply that by three since they all came in petite, average height, and tall. In reality, since none of us fits into ONE type of body, I got much more information than one could've thought. For example, I'm curvy and petite but there were some suggestions from the larger on bottom section that I can definitely use to my advantage... and this is just the beginning, I went on picking up useful pointers from all over. Sure, you're definitely more of one certain body type than all the others and that's where you'll find the majority of your advice, but do browse through all the book because the useful tips are everywhere and you're bound to pick them up from all over, not just YOUR four or five pages.

Other than that, I enjoyed the rapport between them even in written form and admired them for having stripped down themselves to their swimsuits to model (no big deal though when they both look great). As far as that whole quality over quantity thing, it's not a rule cast in stone. I still am not too comfortable with the idea of buying sweaters of hundreds plus dollars (or suits in the thousand's area) so looking at the pictures came quite in handy when trying to recreate looks at some of my favorite stores. You can too. Enjoyable, useful book.