Faux Bow

I wear a lot of belts and I often wear them at the waist or even around my ribcage. If the belt isn’t fairly small, I’m left with excess strap flapping about. In the past, I’ve secured the excess using doublestick tape, paperclips, binder clips, or the clip on my work badge. If you are wearing a belt with a prong-less buckle, a chic way to deal with the excess length is to pull it back through to form a faux bow.

1. Place the belt at the desired point on your waist and pull the strap through the buckle.

2. Hold the strap taut by grasping it halfway along its length and begin to rethread the end of the strap through the buckle. (Keeping the strap taut will improve with practice.)

3. Leave the loop of strap outside of the buckle. This forms one half of the “bow.”

4. Continue threading the end of the strap through buckle.

5. Adjust the free end and the loop to be about the same size and smooth the “knot” framed by the buckle.

The result is more bow-like when the strap is wider than the buckle (as is the case here), so that the strap flares on either side. Although it isn’t as pretty, you can still use this trick with belts that have equally sized buckles and straps (like my newly swapped gold belt.)

(I learned this trick by studying the way a mannequin was styled at Charlotte Russe.)