Let's face it's there's a lot of rules out there that govern our day-to-day fashion. Don't wear black and navy blue, don't wear horizontal stripes, don't mix materials, no brown shoes and black slacks, and the list goes on. If we really sat down and went through every fashion 'adage' out there, we probably wouldn't be able to string together a single outfit to wear that didn't violate at least one of them, if not more. And while all these rules at some point were repeated with good intent, some of them just don't apply any more, and some of them never really did.

Today's plus size fashion marketplace is much more sophisticated than it has been at any other place or time in history. For example, would you ever be caught wearing white after Labor Day? Honestly? Please. That rule is so far outdated that 99% of us probably don't know where it came from in the first place. Interestingly, it was originally a rule for shoes, not clothes in general. The rule was that you were only supposed to wear white pumps or heels between Labor Day and Memorial Day. And the origins? It's still not 100% clear, but it seems to stem from generally accepted principles of the upper-crust of society that were simplified for the growing middle class during the early half of the 20th century.

But that still doesn't explain the rule. One theory is that the widely accepted rule was simply a reminder that one should not wear summer fashions in the winter. Stated in other terms, it's easy to separate heavy winter fashions to the cold winter months, but not so with what people once considered summer fashions, i.e. white shoes. So the reminder was codified and passed on from the upper class to the middle class as a social no-no. One that still lives with us today and continues to evolve.

So let's take a look at another one: horizontal stripes make you look round, vertical stripes are thinning. It's hard to say where this came from, but it's almost common knowledge in the civilized world today. The only problem is it has recently been proven patently false by a quasi-scientific experiment.

York University in cooperation with Marie Claire recently conducted study in which Marie Claire printed a photograph with women wearing both horizontal and vertical stripes. Readers were asked to judge which ones looked slimmer, and by what margin. The women were, of course, as close to the same size as is humanly possible. The reads came back judging that the women in the horizontal stripes were thinner by a margin of 6%. So there we have it - fashion myth busting at its best!