Clothes with Vertical Stripes
The perception expert Peter Thompson shattered the theory that held that wearing clothes with vertical lines made her look thinner detract from the horizontal stripes.
The group of researchers led by Thompson at the University Of York, England, showed that the vertical lines patterned clothing creates the illusion of a bulkier body, contradicting the myth that thousands of people share.
According to an article published in the British newspaper “The Times” Scientists used 200 pairs of photographs of women dressed in clothes of vertical and horizontal lines. And then they asked a group of volunteers to bring the woman in each pair that felt thinner.
Surprisingly, women were wearing clothes emblazoned with the horizontal lines chosen as the thinnest, with a difference of six percentage points.
But Thompson and his team are not the first to discover this perceptual reality, the German scientist Hermman von Helmholtz described in 1860 as horizontal striped clothes were more favorable for women it makes them look taller.
Helmholtz devised two sets of parallel lines, one vertical and one horizontal that fit into a square. Both had the same size, however, the vertical lines seemed to cover a larger area, something that the scientist called the “illusion of the square.”
Knowledge of Helmholtz was lost in the twentieth century, when introduced, inexplicably, the idea that a figure “plump” would benefit from vertical stripes.
