u/Pegaret_Again

Please post your line sketches here!

I could be wrong here, but I often suspect people are analysing outfits, styling and celebrities based on what appears to be their personal taste - preferring one dress above another dress, judging one hairstyle as prettier than another, just vibe-typing an outfit and blam, you have the ID!

But

I feel that Kibbe Identities are not about your own taste. Developing taste is a seperate (and important) task. I feel IDs sit outside of taste? Tasteless! Thats why i can be a fan of this philosophy even though I'm not necessarily aligned with Kibbe's particular way of styling his clients.

I see IDs as more about maximising visual impact & storytelling, so as to be memorable. Meme-able! And i think there's something unapologetic and brave about that.

Therefore i don't think picking the prettiest dress out of lineup is a meaningful way to engage with Kibbe concepts. In a way you might need to imagine something intangible, a half-seen suspicion of a style story that has not yet manifest.

Kibbe IDs apply equally to the main character and the supporting roles. The princess and the witch, the heroine and the villainess. The ingenue and the sage.

If you want to be blandly generically pretty, i don't know if Kibbe is going to help a great deal with that? I'm repeatedly surprised and confused when people view this system as a kind of male gaze-y, man-pleasing style system because for me it really is about accepting & amping up your uniqueness and individuality, the opposite of what a male gaze objectifies. I mean, you could certainly view IDs as generic, one-note Hollywood glamour aesthetics but i think thats only one form of execution of these ideas. For me its more as a way to clear out the weeds in order focus on ideas that have harmonic resonance with your individual presence, and amplify what is already there.

My (perhaps controversial, I don't know) take is that any parts of the Kibbe process which feel introspective only serve the purpose of helping us seperate our own internal experience/perspective/taste from the external rubric of Kibbe.

When you are learning any new skill or subject, it's never particularly helpful to drill down into your own experience first.

Now of course, our style and bodies are so personal the temptation is to map perceived Kibbe concepts onto our pre-existing experience.

But this is backwards. The problem is, we won't know what parts of our experience are relevant until we have a clue what the Kibbe concept is supposed to be measuring.

This is why i think reverse-engineering - while I don't personally hate it - can be unhelpful. We can be cycling around within our own assumptions, rather than grasping what's pertinent or learning something new.

And i think approaching the Kibbe system with too much introspection can be a form of reverse-engineering our soul. We might need to set aside our internalised view of ourselves to make room for a different perspective.

What are your thoughts?

tw if body measurements are an issue for you. take care of your mental health!

I would be interested to know if there are any non-yang types (ie, not SN, FN, D or SD) who have a high bust or full bust measurement that is greater than about 97cm/38 inches, and a hip measurement > 100cm.

I have been thinking thoughts about literal scale & sizing, and you might be able to help - or completely destroy - some theories!!!

Please post your line sketches here!

Please post your line sketches here!