Fashion 88 : Dressing Down for Success
Lately, executive vice chairman Adrienne Hall has been cutting her skirts and baring her knees. And she never once thought about how her clients and male associates at Eisaman, Johns & Laws Advertising would react, she said.
“At all the corporate meetings I attend, the most successful women look like dynamite,” Hall says. “They wear skirts above their knees and brilliant colors. And that includes senior vice presidents at major banks in New York.”
Droves of business and professional women of all ages and ranks are no longer dressing according to anyone’s rules and regulations. They’re not only baring their kneecaps, but arriving to work in, well, you name it: Silk floral blazers, black leather trousers, powder-pink suits, body-hugging dresses.
Surely you remember the safe-suit days. The concept was called “Dress for Success,” coined from John T. Molloy’s 1976 best-seller, and espoused by Molloy in his 1978 book “The Woman’s Dress for Success Book.”
If women in corporate America didn’t wear the female equivalent of a man’s business suit--the main difference being a long, straight skirt--they were sternly warned by image consultants, by talk-show guests and even during special department store induction sessions, that they were in danger of not being taken seriously.
Today, Jane Evans wears her skirts two inches above her knees (she has good legs from playing tennis, she says) and up-to-the- minute Italian and American designer suits, dresses and pants (Emanuel Ungaro, Valentino, Anne Klein, Calvin Klein). And, yes, she is successful.
A former executive vice president of General Mills, Evans is now a general partner in the Montgomery Consumer Fund (a San Francisco-based investment company) and a member of the board of directors of Phillip Morris Inc.
“When I walk into a room,” Evans, who is in her mid-40s, says, “I have a presence. I certainly don’t dress like I’m a come-on to men, but I do wear color and I do wear jewelry. I wear leather and I wear suede. I don’t look like an investment banker.”
Regarding wearing the uniform, Evans says: “I don’t want to be a wallflower in a sea of men.”
New York image consultant David Kibbe, author of “Metamorphosis” (Atheneum, $19.95) and adviser to corporate clients such as American Express and Touche Ross & Co., maintains that, if anything, the dress-for-success uniform marks a working woman like a scarlet letter.
“It’s out, except for entry-level-type women in basic clerical positions who aren’t going very far in their career,” Kibbe says. “It shows you aren’t successful because you have no freedom of dress, and that means you don’t have power.
“Some of my professional women clients are in very, very conservative Wall Street businesses, but no one has to be robbed of their individuality,” Kibbe explains. “It’s just the opposite. To be successful, you need to be in the center of who you are, not in something that robs you of your identity and sophistication.”
After mulling the topic over, Maria Hummer, a partner in the law firm Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg & Phillips, says: “I guess I have trouble with taking the subject of fashion too seriously as it relates to professional life.”
Hummer, who is also president of the Board of Airport Commissioners of the city of Los Angeles, contends that “what is important for men and for women is their competency. Frankly, I don’t see fashion as an issue.”
That may be because the understated Hummer has arrived. She wears a pale pink Valentino suit to the office one day, a navy-and-red Chanel suit another day. Most of her skirts brush the top of her knee. “Being well-groomed and dressing appropriately doesn’t mean one has to be drab or wear a uniform,” she says. “I don’t have a color I don’t wear to the office. I don’t think that way.”
Neither does Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Diane Wayne. “I don’t own a suit,” Wayne says. “I’m not saying women shouldn’t wear suits, I’m saying I don’t like them for me.”
When Wayne removes the judicial black robe she wears in court and attends office conferences, she is usually seen in some sort of ethnic-looking creation.
On this particular day, that means a long, suede skirt, belt slung over her hips, boots and a man’s white silk pajama top she has converted into a blouse. Dangling on her ears are large metallic earrings--she has four holes pierced in her left ear.
Is she ever worried that her unorthodox fashion approach might undermine her authority? “People don’t tend to criticize a judge,” Wayne replies with a sly grin.
Deborah Kelman of Brocato & Kelman Public Relations says: “To excel in my field you have to have a bit of a chameleon quality, not only in your approach to people but in what you wear.
“It’s appropriate to go into a meeting with Michael Mann (producer of “Miami Vice” and “Crime Story”) in black leather pants, a man’s shirt and boots, but to a meeting with executives of one of our corporate clients, I’d wear a suit or a dress,” says Kelman, adding, “although I’d never wear a dress-for-success suit with a little bow at my neck.”
Some segments of the fashion industry are getting the picture. “We think executive women have changed attitudinally in the last five years,” says Coleen Brady, executive vice president of Alcott & Andrews, a New York-based chain of 14 shops, catering to women of achievement. (There is an Alcott & Andrews boutique in the South Coast Plaza.)
Among the store’s best-selling items are softly tailored jackets in silk prints, predominantly florals. There are 63 silk prints to choose from, some colorful enough to rival a “beautiful Monet painting,” Brady said. This season, the store is also offering trousers.
The Broadway department stores are going to be big on trouser suits for fall, but the store is also endorsing short skirts as well as longer ones. Today women are savvy enough to dress according to the business occasion; consequently they need fashion options, says Lee Cass, vice president and fashion director.
Marsha Brander, owner of Componix, a Los Angeles-based clothing manufacturer geared for contemporary career women, goes so far as to say women want to look sexy on the job. “They want men to look at them like they’re women. When we first entered the work force, we had to fall into place like little soldiers. Now we’re saying, ‘Notice my legs first, not my appraisals.’ ”
