Dressing when you are tall comes with its own set of problems, and its own hard-won solutions. The founder of the tall-women’s fashion brand TTYA, which she started in 2013, has spent years working them out, and her approach to summer dressing is a useful guide for anyone above average height.
Her starting point is that not being able to wear everything actually teaches you how to build a wardrobe. Growing up, she found the options for taller women simply weren’t there, so shopping meant constantly calculating where a sleeve, waist or hem would land. That habit, frustrating at the time, turned into a skill: knowing what genuinely works on her frame rather than buying on impulse.
She is also quick to point out that “tall” is not a single body type. Two women can both be 5’11” and need completely different clothes; one might need a 36-inch inseam, another more length through the torso. As she puts it, designing for tall women was never as simple as adding four inches to everything, which is why fit, not just length, sits at the centre of her rules.
There is a wider lesson in her seasonal advice, too. Summer can turn into an endless churn of new trends and fresh “holiday wardrobes,” but she doesn’t believe you need to start from scratch each year. The more useful move is to understand your proportions well enough that you can buy less and wear it more, adapting a core set of pieces rather than chasing every passing trend.
For tall women who have spent years feeling underserved by the high street, that is the real takeaway. The constraints of dressing a taller frame, handled well, become a filter that leaves you with a sharper, more personal wardrobe than most people ever build.
