There might be some truth behind the old fashion adage that horizontal stripes make the figure look thicker, according to one woman's award-winning amateur study.

Val Watham, 53, was driven to investigate horizontal stripes and their effect on one's appearance by research published in 2008 by Dr Peter Thompson, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of York.

Thompson's work, which was based on two-dimensional drawings, actually found horizontal stripes to be thinning.

Watham was unconvinced, so the organizational consultant from Berkshire decided to conduct some research of her own.

For her experiment, Watham asked 500 people to watch videos of average-sized models wearing various pieces of striped clothing. She enlisted the help of fashion students at the University of the Creative Arts to make and model the clothes.

The viewers were then asked to rate how tall and wide the models looked.

Watham's participants rated those models in horizontal stripes as the widest, vertical stripes as the tallest, and head-to-toe outfits as the slimmest.

While a professional university study would likely include a much larger control group, judges of the BBC's Amateur Scientist of the Year award were impressed.

Watham took the top prize in this year's competition, beating over 1,000 other entrants, the Telegraph reported.

Judges called her project "a lovely idea which was well executed, had clear results and leads on to further research. You can't ask more from a science experiment."

What fashion rules do you live by? Do you avoid horizontal stripes for fear of widening your figure? Let us know in the comments section below.