Inverted triangle body shape

What the measurements say

The bust or shoulder measures more than five percent above the hip, so the silhouette narrows downward.

A worked example

Three measurements that produce a inverted triangle result, run through the calculator itself. The ratios below are its own output, so if a threshold changed and this example stopped producing this shape, the build would fail rather than the page quietly going out of date.

• Bust against hip. Within 5% either way counts as balanced. Yours is wider at the bust.
• Waist against bust. How far the waist draws in from the bust measurement.
• Waist against hip. How far the waist draws in from the hip measurement.
• Waist definition. A waist at least 25% smaller than both bust and hip is conventionally called defined. Yours draws in 13.3% at the narrower of the two.

Telling it apart from what it gets confused with

Inverted triangle or hourglass?

The same test as for a pear, in the other direction. Bust and hip have to sit within five percent for an hourglass; here the bust is clearly the wider measurement. A defined waist does not change the classification.

More on that shape

What is worth knowing about it

This shape is common among people who swim, row or lift, and that is worth saying because the styling literature tends to treat it as a problem to be balanced. Broad shoulders are the result of doing something, and the category is describing where a garment needs room rather than passing judgement on the outcome.

The practical difficulty is real and specific: shirts and jackets that fit the shoulder are often loose everywhere else, because shoulder width is the one dimension on a jacket that cannot be altered afterwards. Fitting the shoulder and altering the rest is the standard advice for exactly that reason.

What it means for clothes

• Volume at the hip — fuller skirts, wider legs, pockets — balances a broader shoulder line.
• Softer, narrower shoulder seams do more than any other single change.
• V necklines open the chest area and lengthen the upper body's visual line.

All of this is about how garments hang, which is a question about cloth rather than about you. Sizing systems are drafted around assumptions, and a shape that ready-to-wear serves badly is a drafting assumption failing rather than a body failing to cooperate.

Measure rather than guess

The body shape calculator takes three tape measurements and shows every ratio and threshold behind the result. No weight, no BMI, no ideal, and nothing is uploaded — the arithmetic runs in your browser.

These categories come from pattern drafting rather than from anatomy: they describe where a garment needs room. They are not a taxonomy of people, they carry no health meaning, and nothing here scores or ranks anyone. Three circumferences cannot support a claim about health and this tool does not make one.