There are so many misconceptions about us “petites” already.  With statics of the average size woman trending towards the petite side of things, why is it so difficult to fit clothing that fits?

Even as a manufacturer and designer, getting the right fit is challenging.  The customer makeup isn’t constant yet as we are still in growth phase.  Knowing we can’t fit everyone, even within a niche like this, we can strive to get it as close to right as possible.  And how can we do that?  Fit models?  Yes, but the fit model has to represent you-or in this case, the average petite “you”.

With planning our next collection, we want to get a better idea of who our Nhulie girls are.  You’re the celebrity.  We want eyes on you, not Eva or Kelly or whoever.  They’ve got enough attention.  It’s our time to shine.

So whip out your measuring tapes and please send us your perfect petite inches.    It will take just a few moments.  We are needing the following information:

age

bust

waist

hips

height

You can send your information over to customersupport@nhulie.com.

Thank you so much for all your support.

One thing to keep in mind, when tucking your pants in your boots, try picking out bottoms that isn’t going to slouch or gather at the top of your boots.  Jeans will tend to do this.  The look will make you look sloppy and short.  So try to avoid them if you can by choosing leggings or tight fitting bottoms.   This will keep things sleek and create clean lines for a taller, slimmer appearance.  BCBGMaxAzria carries some great heavier weight synthetic leggings, like their Mason Leggings, that are more pant like than tights. Investing in a good quality pair of leggings will avoid the question of  whether or not you borrowed them from your teenage daughter.

When in dresses, think short, really short as an inch or two above the knee and even go higher if your comfortable.  On the opposite end of things, you can go long, maxi long, so that the look creates a longer appearance.  Nhulie’s Vintage Joanny Long Dress is meant to be worn long and grazing the floor.  This dress looks great with boots in the spring when the weather is sunny yet still crisp and cool.  Picking a boot with a heel will give you some hidden height under the Vintage Joanny Long Dress.  Most other lengths of dresses or skirts will create one too many horizontal lines across our bodies that tend to make us look shorter than we want to be when it’s paired with a boot, and we don’t need that do we now?

With all of the lengths of boots available this season, the length of boot can be a bit tricky.  I would probably best avoid the ones that hit your mid calf.  Unless you have arms for legs, your mid calves are going to the be the widest part of your leg below the knee.  So keep the eye candy to the short ankle boots or again, go the opposite direction and take it to the knees.  Tip though with the ankle boot, if your going to dress this up with a skirt or short dress, try to keep the leggings or tights the same color.  This is where the one color thing will keep you looking sleek and slim.

With all the other embellishments that can be found on boots, have fun with them.  Just put confidence into your stride and you’ll be admired by many.

The stuff that I really love though has just been discounted at almost 50% off!  I am constantly getting raves from the girls about how much they love the vintage collection.  So take advantage of the sale. Most of these items are just about below the cost it takes me to make the clothing so it’s a steal.  The fabric designs are vintage reproductions and it will be a nice addition to your closet for many years.  It’s just one of those vintage pieces that you’ll never get tired of bragging about.

Everything we make is manufactured in Los Angeles. The quality and details for the clothing is excellent and can bump along side some of my other favorite designers out there.

Being a Nhulie girl means being unique and individualistic and not looking like everyone else out there.  Allow your clothing to express the beautiful person that God created you to be.  Be true to who you are and don’t give in to public opinion.  Conformity only justifies another person’s misery so don’t let it be yours too.  It doesn’t do your mind and body any good.

Enough said.  I have two girls to spend some time with before school starts again.  Boo!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with our fit and style, it will be  a great opportunity to come down in person and check us out.  Best part about supporting Nhulie for Balzac Clothing LLC is that we will be donating 50% of today’s proceeds to Hand of Hope, a Christian charity non profit organization that supports people in need around the world.   

Thank God it’s Friday!

It’s hard enough finding the energy to get out of the house and spend the next hour or so sweating it out at the gym, park, lake, beach, or wherever.   You have the kids, your work, your spouse, housework, or the couch calling for your attention.  So when do you have some good quality time to invest in your health and well being?   So if you are going to hit the gym or beach, be it known that EVERYONE is looking at EVERYBODY.  

The gym is a small environment where you’re sharing sweaty benches and cardio machines and stretching in front of other people- and most likely you’ll run into someone you know.  Hips too wide, rear too round?  Arms a bit flabby, or the mommy pouch that could hold groceries if it could.  Starting to feel self conscious yet?   Where do you find the motivation to keep going?  It’s only February and you can’t quit yet.  How can you make it the best out of the situation?

My partial answer to this is to invest in some good gym clothes and a great pair of shoes.  I am a big believer in wearing clothes that make you feel good and not worrying too much about the rules too much.  But at the gym, your attire matters.  It gives you motivation to get up and go.  It will help keep you stay positively focused when your energy may be diminishing.  Plus the right gym clothes will make it  look like you know what your doing.   You wouldn’t play tennis in your jeans nor would you take self defense classes in your bathing suit.  It’s all in the clothes and your workout is no exception.  

You have to spend a little bit of money on a couple of outfits that you can rotate through and wash each week.  Quality is important in gym wear.  Find the materials with some technology built into the fabric and construction of the garment.  It should  keep you dry by whisking away the perspiration and perhaps keep bacteria at bay.  There’s nothing more uncomfortable than a cold sweaty t-shirt when you are crunching away.  

Showing some skin is in. But for us petite women, put that focus on the upper body- the neckline, arms and shoulders.  I advise against wearing shorts if possible.  I know it gets a bit hot during the summer months and even I break down and pull on my shorts when the temperature gets in the 90′s and up.  But most shorts are designed with a bigger/taller body type in mind so when a petite woman puts on the same shorts that are meant to hit at the high thigh, those shorts are now dropping longer and hitting our mid thighs giving us a stocky and shorter appearance, add to this is the line that your shoes create at the ankles, making your appearance even shorter.  But if you must don a pair of shorts, find them as short as as legally possible.  This way, the cut will hopefully sit more flattering on you and thus helping you focus on your more treasured ASSet.  I did find a pair Nike bike style shorts that were almost perfect for petites.  The inseam was a good length, not too long on a petite body.   But the problem was in the rise of the shorts which would have sit nicely on a taller woman’s hips but the waist band nearly came up to my belly button.  

Pick up a couple of dark colored long workout pants.  This will help slim and lengthen the look of your petite body.  Vertical striping will also add to the lengthening effect if you can find some.  I just picked up a pair of gym pants at Bebe Sport which are black with pink veritical stripes along the side.  They came in petite length too!   

One of my favorite memories at the gym was about a woman that I used to see every Saturday afternoon.   She would sit on the recumbant bike in a big grey sweatshirt and baggie grey sweat pants and peddle slowly enjoying her Baskin Robbins ice-cream.  Yeah no kidding.  They actually let her in the gym.  But I found it unfortunate, not for the fact that ice-cream that negated the workout effort, but that she would come every Saturday like this, with her body hidden away under all that fleece and not seeing her muscles contract and release and to be able to admire the strength and energy in her body at work.  I think it’s a beautiful thing to see the physical strength of an athlete- swimmer, runner, climber.  But our bodies are no different.  It’s a matter of investing in yourself.   If you can look the part during your workout, then you can focus on the more important things like  seeing the cut in your biceps when you do that last painful curl.  And before you know it, your arms aren’t just logs on joints and your thighs don’t slap together like they used to when you walk.  Then you can give yourself a congratulatory pat on the back and go reward yourself with a brand new workout outfit.

Linen Dress

My brother got married a few months ago.   I decided to make a dress this time- an original Nhulie for Balzac dress, instead of trying desperately to find a petite dress. If you are petite, you will know how frustrating it is to go shopping and not able to find anything that is glamorous or sexy or age appropriate for your unique occasion.  It’s hard to find something that isn’t black or white, let alone finding a long floor length dress in petites is very rare.  And if I do find a short dress in the standard sizing, the hem usually goes past my knees and I end up looking frumpy or not as sexy and stylish as I could be.  I can’t say that I have a favorite designer that has dresses in petite sizing but maybe it’ll just be Nhulie that becomes my favorite.  On a side note, I enjoy seeing Diane Von Furstenberg in public because she’s usually in her own designs, an obvious sign that her heart is in her own style.  I have a short navy blue dress of hers that I bought.   Surprisingly it fit except for the length of the  V-neck dipped down too low and the hem was a bit long- a common problem for petite women.  But I loved it enough on me to spend the 395.00.

Anyway, I love working with linen.  I have a roll of pink and orange gingham linen that I picked up from LA that I have been wanting to spend some time working with.  I think it would look fabulous in the more colorful palette.  But for this dress I used a beige linen, medium weight to make my dress for my brother’s wedding- didn’t want to stand out too much.   So I whipped up this dress to glamour myself up a bit.  It’s hard to tell on the dress form how nice and dressy it comes once on your own body.  The mini bustling at the hem provided a nice sway and kick when I walk.  The linen draped beautifully.  The waistline was dropped a bit down to the hips and it zipped up along the side.   I received tons of compliments on it, the day of the wedding but surely didn’t take away from the bride’s special day in her beautiful wedding dress.  

Have a balzie day!

One common thread that I saw in the comments was how different the pants are.    Being different and standing out among the crowd has always been inherent to me and my tastes and I hope to follow this through in the design of the petite label.   The Candy Pants was one that I felt I wanted to push the envelope a bit and do something that your not going to find in your basic petite section of the department store.  

Providing a petite clothing line that’s trendsetting and unique is at the forefront of the design process.  So taking risks and venturing out a bit is going to be part of the deal.   I see a lot sites providing tips on the do’s and don’ts of dressing a petite body.   But quite frankly, I’ve always carried the philosophy that if you understand your body and keep in mind tasteful decisions, a petite woman shouldn’t feel restricted with all the guidelines- if it makes you feel good and sexy and alive, than wear it with confidence and style.   Perhaps it’s a puritanical mind set that has been with us for a handful of centuries that has gotten our underpants in a wad that we’ve nearly lost our creativity in dressing ourselves.   

With that being said however, I do realize that it is hard to find styles that match a woman’s tastes especially if she is the type to venture out and try new fashion trends before they reach the masses.   So does it come in petite sizing?  Most likely not.

candy pants petite

The pants are going to be great all year round from fall to next spring.  The colors of these pants are very neutral and it’s going to be like nothing you can find in the malls and nothing in boutiques since they don’t cater to petite women.  I have received lots of good feedback from the women who have worn these pants. So GO sign yourself up to win!!!!!!!

For more details about the pants, go to Balzac’s website: http://www.balzacclothing.com

I mentioned to Cynthia (who has a great petite blog as well called Shorty Stories http://blog.shorty-stories.com/) that this year has been a year of experiences and experiments.  I think the beauty of being on your own and going after your dreams is that you can try new things and conduct life experiments at your own cost (and not worry whether you’re going to get fired or not).  Having people to support me on my journeys has made the experiments a lot less discomforting.  Getting out of one’s comfort zone is quite discomforting for many people right?  Isn’t that why they call it a “zone”,  a nice protected invisible space that’s as comforting as your mother’s bosoms when you were a wee bit of a bugger?  But eventually we have to stop sucking our thumbs and do some growing up I suppose.

So I told myself at the beginning of the year that I have to try and do something new at least weekly.  I want to do it daily but I forget or get distracted and don’t want to be too demanding on myself.  

So reflecting on this past week as I dissolve this comfort zone bubble of mine…

I took a turbo kick boxing class for the first time.  I’m a bit clumsy and uncoordinated when it comes to these things.  I’m a regular at my gym.  I like my routine of wieghts and then hitting the bike or treadmill, nothing unexpected.  So getting out of my comfort zone and breaking into this 9:15am Saturday class of regular TKB enthusiasts was a bit intimidating.  So no broken ankles and just a bit sore the next day which actually felt kind of good.

On Wednesday I was in downtown LA visiting my contractors.  I decided to make small talk to a stranger on the elevator whose replies were directed at his shoes actually, and I think he couldn’t run away fast enough after we got to ground floor.  Oh, and that same Wednesday, I brought some Vietnamese eggrolls to the parking guy who is always curious of my look and wonders where I come from (hopefully not space).  So I think that he experienced something new that day too.

I think tomorrow as I watch myself on cable TV, that will be an experience.  Perhaps a bit embarrassing since I don’t know what will be edited and presented to the reality TV junkies of the world.  But I feel that I can’t grow spiritually without taking these risks and putting myself out there for other opportunities to come forth from it.  So I’ve resolved myself to having fun while doing it.  Fun, now that’s comforting.