Power to you
Throw out the rulebook. Conservative work wear is usurped by the bold, bright and glamorous.
Ihave a working definition of power, which came to me in an anecdote about Prince. One night last year, according to someone who was there, Prince, the elusive chanteur who died in April, went to a concert in New York. Twenty minutes into the show, he decided he wanted McDonald’s French fries. Fifteen minutes after that, McDonald’s French fries were served to him on a white china plate. He ate standing up. Power like that has no uniform.
In the late 1970s and 80s, white-collar women began to dress for the power they wanted, not the power they had. Suits were grey, maybe navy. Collars were white. Jackets were doublebreasted, the better to hide a pair of breasts. If uniformity was the object of “power dressing”, the prototype was Katharine Hepburn, a woman for whom pockets seemed invented; who embodied the whole idea of a tall order; whose tomboy élan
and gun-moll humour, in combination with a number of custom-made suits, made her the ultimate midcentury working girl. As Hepburn once said of Humphrey Bogart: ‘‘He’s a real man, nothing feminine about him.’’ A powerful woman couldn’t have much feminine about her either. This spring, the codes have been switched. “Unisex” no longer means “mannish”, but rather glamorously bisexual in a fin- de-siècle way. “Nine to five” means “nine am to five am”, which means daywear looks a lot like Saturdaynight wear. I’m not sure “appropriate” means anything. Here’s a list I made of looks you should try right now (unless it’s actually a list of things Prince once wore that I love): Harleyready leather, head-to-toe polka dots, oversized white shirts with black thigh-high stockings, brassy or brocaded jackets over Elizabethan frills, silk suits in violet or orange. What Hepburn in the 50s was to women at work in the 80s, Prince in the 80s – half-freaky, half-ladylike, and always a bit overdressed – is to us now. The new looks may be too loud to confer real authority, but with the right attitude, you may just look so extraordinary as to seem irreplaceable. Gucci is leading the craze. Last January, a hithertounknown designer, the 43-year-old Alessandro Michele, was promoted from inside the fashion house to become its creative director and the toast of the industry. His collections have been, accordingly, a lesson in rapid advancement, as well in the charms of unexpectedness. Secretary dresses and skirts with matching blouses – pussy-bowed, preposterously coloured, embroidered – got louder and sheerer as the show went on, proving that outfits can be as open-concept as offices. Trousers came purposefully, imperfectly creased, perhaps to remind us that if women on the make are no longer ironing men’s clothes, we’re also short of time to iron our own.
In the mid-90s, the Chicago Tribune’s “Women at Work” columnist, Carol Kleiman, proposed that a woman fed up with sexist style rules should dress for a casual Friday, “like a Mighty Morphin Power Ranger, preferably in a very bright colour, with comfortable boots”, since in an outfit like this, “no-one will dare mess with you by suggesting a list of dress-down clothes to wear to work”. If the “power suit” circa Tom Ford at Gucci was lean and mean and made a gal look like a neo-noir detective, the new or alternative suiting is versatile and mismatched, the look of a superhero halfway through a costume change. If we’re always working as late as we say we are, we might as well dress for Friday like it’s Saturday night. Or like it’s a lucky Sunday morning. For spring, lingerie was the rage at Balenciaga, where Alexander Wang showed nothing that wasn’t pure white. At Givenchy for spring and pre-fall ’16, Riccardo Tisci maxed out the potential of black and white crepe-back satin and point-de-gaze lace. Call it bedroom-to-boardroom dressing, a fad so oddly romantic as to be totally uncool – though Prince, no stranger to lace, would likely say otherwise. To be cool, Prince told Rolling Stone in 1990: ‘‘All you have to ask yourself is: ‘Is there anybody I’m afraid of?’
WE MIGHT AS WELL DRESS FOR FRIDAY LIKE IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT
If not, then you’re cool.’’ Maybe it’s enough to be fearless, redundant to be fearsome; men have tended, anyway, to be afraid of the women they don’t scare. Certainly – I’m not being facetious here – one way to suggest you have nothing to fear at work, on the train or on the street is to dress every inch the soft target.
A decade after The Woman’s Dress for Success Book by John T. Molloy, the 1977 best-selling guide to Hepburnesque professionalism at work, the author complained to the Los Angeles Times that businesswomen “fluff out” at the top. “They wear conservative clothing for 10 promotions,” he said, “then deny that they were tough as nails to get there and start dressing like Madame Bovary.”
If Molloy meant to suggest that women who run with the wolves shouldn’t wear sheep’s clothes, he may have had a point, although I’d say the clothes he was recommending – those “boring but powerful” separates in colourless cotton and wool – were considerably more sheepish than those he mocked, asking: “Can you imagine a man wearing an orange suit?” Luckily, today you can.
Of course, Molloy did not consider the odds that a woman has been denying herself risk or frivolity in her sartorial choices for years, and only now is no longer in denial; the probability that a woman whose success depends on being seen as “one of the guys” might, upon getting there, look around her and say: “Wait, I take it back.”