Get Ready for Spring 2011 with Stripes

If you don’t know what to expect from Spring / Summer 2011, one word should suffice: stripes. Of course, this spring will be all about bright colors and prints, but stripes will be the one trend that will rule over them all.

Prints have been coming strong in fashion for a few summers now, but 2011 will definitely be the year of stripes, Liz Jones of the Daily Mail notes, something that designers have already announced with their latest collections.

Whether they come in plain black and white (the navy theme will persist) or in bold colors like orange and raw green, or even clashing with other prints, like florals and animal prints, there is one golden rule to wearing stripes.

And that is: always take into account your body type before wearing them. Useless to say, a few extra pounds extra will look double if you wear something with stripes that doesn’t look good, Jones underlines.

The same goes for girls who are not very tall: if you put horizontal stripes on, you’re sure to look even shorter than you are in real life, a rule that must be common-sense by now.

“A gently pleated skirt with a horizontal stripe is pretty, but I’d avoid this look unless you have a tiny waist,” Liz Jones recommends.

“A crisp navy and white stripe is one way of nodding towards the nautical trend this spring, rather than going the whole hog with anchors and deckshoes (as a child, I once sewed a fabric anchor on to my navy loons, which shows you how long all things sailor have been in and out of fashion),” she adds.

“I really love stripes used in evening wear, as in a gorgeous horizontally striped skirt by Jil Sander, although you’d need to be 6ft to carry it off,” she points out.

There is one major disadvantage to stripes though: they may be fresh, bold and fun, but they’re not in any way sophisticated, Jones believes. Fashion designers would disagree though: take for instance the photo attached to this article.