An additional tip for the cleavage would be a nice necklace with something dangling from it, also distracts attention.
Quote from: Janet Lynn on September 13, 2010, 12:42:31 PM
Never even thought of that. But it would work. 
Depends on the fabric and how exactly it's cut, and how it falls. With thin fabrics, it often makes weird cuttlings in the fabric and just looks ugly. Plus you need to find out the right shoulder pad thickness. My mom's got both square and large shoulders, they form a horizontal line, and she always complained about "having shoulders like a man". Whenever she tries on something with shoulder pads, it looks like she has 2 of them on each shoulder instead of one, and it makes an effect a bit like Tina Turner's costume in Mad Max 3:
I don't know how well the trick works for people with dropping shoulders. Might also be worth first trying it out on second-hand or throw-away clothes of your size.
Now there's also a lot you can do with choosing the right patterns and colors for clothes to make your shoulders look smaller, a woman once told me lots of tips how to hide my oh so horribly large shoulders (I have the same half-GG, half-transwoman skeleton that my mom has - yay!). However, I really did not want to hide them and therefore, unfortunately, do not remember what she told me. Never took all these things into account, so when I wore a dress - and I loved to wear them as long as they looked a bit like drag or were gothic style - I got occasionally "clocked" as a ->-bleeped-<- (male transvestite) when I wore short hair, in part because of my large shoulders though I'm thin and very petit for people here in Germany (5.1 feet) - teenage cliques talked openly behind my shoulders whether I was male or female, and the "look at the large shoulders" argument always was important there. My best passing experiences before T were in "wrong" or badly chosen female clothes, not in male clothes, mind you!
A general tip would be to ask this
special question in GG fashion forums, and more generally to read silly women's fashion, hairdos and and haircuts, makeup etc. magazines for women of your age. Or to buy a
good book on that topic. Not knowing about these things, and the fashion-independent tricks and principles behind it is like a huge lack of general knowledge in many women's circles, and it might make your passing less good, both for lack of knowledge and even much more for a "weird" clothing style. I never learned much about that stuff as I always avoided it, both the discussions and the magazines, and most women went like
- how can that be that you don't know anything about it? They had this reaction no matter how feminine or butch they knew me from my style. So it really makes people wonder if you're female but don't know about that stuff. Though this is Germany here, really not the best model country for for fashion in the world. Casual style is very repanded here.
Knowing about that fashion stuff and taking the tips into account when dressing is something you might want to work on as a transwoman - for both better style and passing. It can be learned. Even the winter, spring, summer and autumn colors thing etc.
If you have the money for it, there are professional
style counsellists who give you good tips what colors suit you well, what looks unsuspicious, what is fashionable right now, what different styles you can choose from, which of the styles might suit you from your personality, background etc., and also special things like hiding your shoulders. And even where people know you're transsexual, it just looks so much better. I think it's really worth the expense, as it gives you a crash-course in female fashion and make-up and saves you the hassle to find it out for yourself and need years for this. Plus over time, you save a lot of money for not buying clothes which don't work for you. You may still change to your own style after that crash-course and a first garderobe.
An ex of mine was born blind, and some blind people occasionally hire a style counsellist (once a year or so, just to choose their clothes and shoes from a catalogue or in the city) as they really had no clue at all what to wear without looking ridiculous or wearing an outfit with mismatching colors. The trick for blind people is: only have few clothes, and only in three or four colors which all fit together, and easy to tell apart from touch. Allthewhile looking good and reflecting the person's personality and background. Her choices were very good, it suited my ex's skin color, personality, age, all, and she always looked gorgeous in them! And my ex told her whether she wanted the clothes to look formal, sexy, casual, romantic, conservative, punk style, ecologists' style or whatever. The counsellist got it all right, apart from one exception. The clothes she once chose for an SM party we wanted to go to looked very good, but seemed to be more for a swinger club or so, with leopard fur etc., but well the counsellist probably didn't have a clue what people wore at SM parties and she still got pretty close to a good solution.
So as long as you don't get too specific, a good style counsellist is a good idea. She cannot replace your teenage years, chatting forever with other girls about clothing or make-up, but she can save you years of horrible clothing styles, bad make-up and dumping clothes which don't work for you, so you'll be on one level with other women much faster - they needed their whole youth for it.
Unfortunately, I can't give many constructive tips here cause I almost never engaged in that kind of conversation and did not learn much about it. And I mostly chose gothic style for feminine clothings, plus mostly only two or three other colors for a change, cause black looks good on me and I don't risk to mismatch colors, plus it looks hot as hell. I even usually buy several exemplaries of a special piece of clothing so I don't need to go shopping too much, I was always like that. Okay, I'm a lazy nerd... I admit it.
Dear Felly, don't take my advice as a personal affront. I don't know how you dress. But for you and the lurkers, I just wanted to give the tips just in case. As I know this kind of sh*t can make a huge difference.
