So I have created a new character that I am trying to make a dress for using cloth simulation. I pre-built the dress with vertices so It matches the body properly. Th dress is supposed to be tight from the waist up and loose on the bottom, but for some reason it won't stay up. I have added collision with full friction on the body mesh and added cloth physics to the dress. It acts how I want from the waist down but falls down completely on the top. I also tried adding a shrinking group to the top half with shrink factors ranging from 0.050 to 0.200, yet It still won't stay up or noticeably shrink to the shape of the body. I don't know if maybe the clothes mesh isn't close enough to the body or if maybe I'm not playing with some of the settings right, since I mostly just use the basics. If anyone knows what might be wrong or if there is a setting I might need to use, then I thank you in advance.
It's hard to tell from just your description. This should work out of the box....Maybe your body mesh has flipped Normals? Then the collision wouldn't work, but it might be something else...
Could provide a link to your .blend file? (Via Dropbox, Google Drive, or....)