Two pieces, one knit, two opposite jobs
The top hangs from the neck and the short hangs from the waist, so the same seamless knit is asked to do two opposite jobs. Up top there is no strap crossing the back: the halter band sits behind the neck, and what actually holds you is the wide band under the bust, which rests on the ribs instead of pressing between them. Below, the waistband is wider still and ribbed, and that is what keeps the short from sliding when you sit.
It is also where the fit splits. The set ships as one size for both halves. If your bust is fuller than your waist, the top runs out of room first and there is no way to take the short down a size to compensate. Sizing up buys room at the top and gives it away at the waist.
The scrunch is a seam, not a pad
Follow the center back of the short and you will find a gathered seam that draws the knit into the crease. Nothing is inserted behind it and nothing is compressed; the shape is made by pulling fabric in, which is why it adds no warmth and no bulk under a pair of jeans.
It is also why the waistband has to be right. One size small and the gather flattens against the body until the line it is meant to draw disappears. One size large and the waistband drops, so the gather sits under you when you sit rather than where it belongs.
Six colorways carry a white line, fourteen hide theirs
Twenty colorways is not twenty versions of the same garment. Six are cut with a contrast band, white against navy, brown, black, pink, red and yellow, running along the neckline, the armhole and the waistband. The other fourteen, four leopard prints among them, are bound the same way in their own color, so the line is there and you cannot see it.
The trim does something a plain colorway cannot. Laid out flat, two solid pieces read as two separate purchases that happen to match; the white line is what makes them read as one outfit from across a room. It also makes the neckline legible at all. A scoop cut in the same color as the body disappears against skin, in a mirror and in a photograph, and the band draws that shape back out. What the trim does not change is the cut. The panels are the same, so a trimmed set is not tighter anywhere than a solid one.
Four of the twenty are printed
Black leopard, deep brown leopard, khaki leopard and pink leopard sit in the same list as black and cream, and they are not the same process. A print is laid across the whole panel and each panel is cut from a different part of it, so the spots fall somewhere else on every set. The photograph on this page is one cutting, not the cutting that will arrive, and two leopard pieces bought separately will not line up with each other the way two dyed pieces of the same color do.
XS to XXL, and the two halves do not split
Six sizes, the widest run here, decided by two measurements that are not on the same scale: the band under the bust for the top, the waistband for the short. Most people will find one of the two is the binding constraint and the other is comfortable. Between sizes the usual advice holds for the short and inverts for the top. Take the larger, because the gather needs slack to work and the band under the bust has less give than the knit around it.
