I was trying on a dress in the Zara changing rooms on Deansgate when I snapped one of those terrible selfies you take at arms length off the mirror above the cubicle door, texted it to a friend (whose name is Freya) with the caption “does this make me look like I’m about to pack down at scrum half?” and got a reply back about four seconds later saying “your shoulders were always going to be the story in that dress, that’s not new information.” Why does that quote time stamp exist on WhatsApp but not for actual elapsed time between events in life I’ve been wondering ever since.
Anyway. Her reply pissed me off. Not because she was wrong – although admittedly that – but because it was the lazy, effortless verdict I hear from clients again and again before they even try things on. Broad shoulders and off the shoulder necklines are filed away in the same mentally tired ‘no no noes’ file as if it’s some sort of immutable law of dressmaking when actually it’s a question that very much depends on which off the shoulder dress you happen to be holding. I’ve now measured enough of them on myself and on clients to realise the ‘instant write off’ happens far too quickly and for all the wrong reasons.
It’s the neckline drop, not the width of you
What people assume is that any style which draws a horizontal line across the top of your body is going to add width to your shoulders, which are busy doing plenty of that on their own account, and when an off the shoulder neckline sits tight to the very edge of your shoulder bone it can do that – and honestly, when it’s a bardot cut that sits completely flat against your shoulders it kinda does always look like more shoulder rather than less. BUT – and this is a big but – that is one specific kind of neckline cut on an off the shoulder dress, not all of them. Broad shoulders don’t work with bardot cuts across the board just like they work with every other style ever invented. Treating bardot as some sort of shorthand for every off the shoulder dress out there is where that instant write off goes wrong.
Go a few inches below the shoulder line instead and onto the upper arm rather than across the shoulder point itself and you change everything about how that horizontal line interacts with the rest of you. The real off the shoulder drop – the kind that lives on Nina Copp NAME dribble blogs and makes people sad because they can’t wear it – moves the eyeline down, softens that horizontal edge instead of stabbing you in the wrist with it. I spent twenty minutes with a client last month broad through the shoulders and convinced they hated all off the shoulder styles after trying on a bardot style top that stopped dead where their shoulder ended and therefore read enormous on them, convincing them to try just one more with a real, proper deep drop from the same shop. They went from complaining to actually standing differently in the mirror – like, actual posture change – because the line had dropped into a place that complemented their frame rather than shouted about it. The width of your shoulders doesn’t matter when it comes to picking the right drop. Where that off the shoulder neckline sits in relation to them does, and that’s not the conversation we usually have about broad shoulders.
Structure does the work elastic can’t
If I’m being honest the second thing no one wants to say because it’s far less satisfying than throwing around words like “flattering” and “not flattering” is that a lot of off the shoulder misses aren’t about your shoulders at all, they’re about dodgy elastic. Cheap elasticated bandeau tops stitched into the under layer of an off the shoulder neckline have got to grip your arm to stay up, which means digging in, which creates that cushion right on the joint everyone already wants to point at whether your shoulders are broad or Barbie thin. I checked two off the shoulder dresses by the same brand a few months ago – both size 10 – one with a structured, lightly boned bodice and one that was 100% elasticated jersey – and the allowance given for the upper arm on the elasticated version was nearly an inch tighter than the structured one. Same supposed size but a completely different experience of that neckline, and that inch makes the difference between a dress that lays nicely across you and one that looks like it wants to fall down every time you put it on. Bonus tip: if it wants to fall down when you put it on it will, because you’re not wrestling a dress around all day, the dress is. Structured bodices don’t rely on your arm holding them up with bone-crushing pressure to keep a off-the-shoulder neckline in place, they hold their own damn shape because of the boning inside them so it stays put instead of riding up into your armpits when you reach for something and suddenly looking like a porno set dressers knocked up quick as you can shirt. It also spreads the weight of the fit out across your ribcage rather than tightening everything up right where everyone feels like their going out broad shouldering. That isn’t a minor detail – it’s hands down the bigger reason of the two because I’ve watched the exact same neckline get ruined on one set of shoulders simply because the under layer wasn’t built to hold it’s shape.
Combine those two things and the instant ‘yeah nah probs broads shoulders’ isn’t even a shrug, it’s fairly scientific: where the drop sits is more important than how wide your shoulders are and whether that bodice is boned or just gonna try and hold you up with elastic. I avoided off-the-shoulder tops for years because one badly fitting bardot top made me feel like I was doing press ups under my dress, and that had nothing to do with how broad my shoulders were and everything to do with a single rubbish garment that any figure could have struggled with. Instant judgement is easy, far easier than thinking about why something doesn’t look right instead of who it doesn’t look right on. Nobody wants to blame themselves, but blaming your body means you get to skip straight past buying another damn dress.
