The women Tim Gunn was trying to help on the first season of his show were, in a word, a mess: Self-admitted fashion victims who didn’t have a clue about what to buy or how to dress because of warped body images.
“You have a great waist, but your clothes make you look like a sack of potatoes,” chastised Bravo’s style guru when observing one poor soul who regularly wore a bulky uniform of a jacket over a sweater and button-down shirt. Gunn knew he could talk until he was blue in the face about silhouette, proportion and fit, but for the second season of “Tim Gunn’s Guide To Style,” he felt he needed some dramatic new way to turn make his point. And educate women about their body types as well as learn how the correct clothing could emphasize what was good and compensate for what was less than perfect. Enter OptiTex, a futuristic software program that takes in at least 25 precise body measurements and spits out a life-size, 3-dimentional image on a 103-inch television screen. It’s you, but in animated cartoon form.
“When you look at yourself in a mirror, you think, ‘Oh, there are those thick thighs and that huge waist,'” says the show’s executive producer, Sarah-Jane Cohen. “But when you see it on OptiTex, because it’s graphic, you see the proportion much better and your eye isn’t compensating for all those things you think are wrong with you.” “We bring so much baggage to that experience of standing in front of a mirror,” says Gunn, who became aware of the snazzy new technology eight years ago when he was chair of the department of fashion design at Parsons The New School For Design. In that setting, says Gunn, the computer program would allow his design students to create patterns that could be fit and altered on an animated model.
The program is so sophisticated that it can show how specific fabrics will drape, so that when the cartoon character moves, you can see how a garment will flow. In essence, the students could create virtual clothes – and then the real clothes – without the need for mock-ups made of muslin. “The designer can say, ‘What would that look like with six flounces instead of two?'” says OptiTex’s Julia Shaw, who works as a consultant for the Bravo show. “In an hour, they can make up 10 variations of a dress, and the designer can pick the one she really likes.” OptiTex, created by an Israeli software designer, was developed in 1988 but gained wider acceptance four years ago, when it became available in 3-D. Its client list includes Target, Kohl’s and Tommy Hilfiger. It’s a pricey investment, running $16,000 for the full program. That does not include the cost of body scanning, which is done by other companies, and the hugeTV screen, if you want a life-size image. “But now,” says Shaw, “it’s being used by dozens of fashion houses that want to cut down on pre-production mistakes and corrections before mass producing their garments.”Gunn brought the OptiTex idea to his producers at “Style” because he believed that he could help his style victims see themselves in a more dispassionate light. He could show them, for example, how a shorter skirt could set off good legs. Or how a V-neck could elongate a short midriff. It worked, he says, for all participants but one.
“She chose to refute what she saw altogether,” says Gunn. “And I said, ‘But this came from your measurements.’ And she said, ‘No, that’s not possible.'”But the rest of us may soon be able to give programs like OptiTex a try, because one of its applications will be used for online shopping. If you take your measurements, you will soon be able to see how a piece of clothing looks on your body type. And even without Tim Gunn, have a better shot at getting it right.
TIM GUNN’S GUIDE TO STYLE
Thursday, 10 p.m., Bravo