Fashion 89 : How Plot of ‘Working Girl’ Can Apply to Real-Life Role
You work hard, study on the side, put in for promotions and trust your corporate chiefs. So where does it get you?
For Tess McGill, the Cinderella heroine of Mike Nichols’ new film “Working Girl,” the answer is absolutely nowhere --not until she changes her style.
From the moment Tess’ new boss, Katharine Parker, struts into view--wearing modern classics and quoting Coco Chanel--appearance is germane to the plot.
Determined to rise from the steno pool to Wall Street executive, Tess (played by Melanie Griffith) sheds her Farrah Fawcett mane for “serious hair” and says goodby to leather, tight miniskirts and bold, bouncy jewelry. Although never intended as a dress-for-success primer, “Working Girl” proceeds like a textbook case.
Describing his heroine’s early struggles, Nichols noted: “ . . . she has great ability for the job she wants to do. But she doesn’t talk right, she doesn’t look right, and in the upper reaches of Wall Street and industry, that’s a huge drawback. Eighty percent of the battle is style.”
A skiing accident takes Katharine (Sigourney Weaver) temporarily out of the picture and allows Tess to take charge. Given access to her boss’s townhouse and ever a quick learner, Tess dips into Katharine’s closet for an executive evening image and picks a black velvet dress so fresh it still carries a $6,000 price tag.
“Six thousand dollars! It’s not even leather ,” moans her friend Cyn (Joan Cusack), looking at the sequin-sprinkled number with its tight waist, full skirt and off-the-shoulder neckline that evokes memories of Kim Novak and Marilyn Monroe.
Just whose label is inside that romantic black velvet? “It’s not one of those people you would recognize,” explained Gary Jones, the film’s assistant costume designer. “We found it and did an immense amount of work to it. It wasn’t that length, that shape--none of those things. We fell in love with the rhinestones. It’s an important dress because of Tess’ transformation and her first meeting with Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford). We did a lot of searching and trying.”
Working with Nichols and costume designer Ann Roth “is a big exercise in reality,” Jones added. “A great deal of research was done on the Staten Island Ferry, which is full of women who look just like Tess and her friend Cyn. In fact, when we started filming, we were in all sorts of downtown Manhattan office buildings. You couldn’t tell our people from the real people.”
Research showed that New York secretaries “were very much into their eye makeup, their hairdos. That’s their persona. That’s the way they go to work. Once they’ve achieved a look, they work on it and improve it.” Secretaries who have seen the movie “seem to love Cyn’s wild skirts, funny jackets and her eye makeup,” Jones said.
Costume designer Roth said she sees women every day who dress like Katharine Parker. “She’s 30, she’s 8 years out of school, 6 years after her MBA. She’s been around. I thought she dressed very conventionally. There was no ground-breaking design here. They’re conventional clothes you can find within 10 miles of where you’re standing right now.
“Convention is comforting, non-threatening,” Roth added. “The truth is, if your mind is really fascinated by the back pages of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, it’s equally not turned on by whether Christian Lacroix is mixing a gold lame skirt with a Shetland sweater.”
Predominantly clad in neutral shades, Katharine also steams into the office in a red jacket and wears a V-neck, knife-pleated red dress to host her first business-related cocktail party, thus becoming “the woman in charge in the midst of all those gray suits,” according to designer Jones.
Roth purposely put her Wall Street men in somber hues. There are no flashy suspenders or shirts in this film: “I meant it to look very different from ‘Wall Street,’ which represents the avaricious side. It’s two different looks. I tended to do Wharton School, Columbia, Harvard sort of grads. Those guys who don’t fly to Paris and England to have their clothes made.”
Even before Tess can invade Katharine’s closet, she begins to dress like her Wall Street “mentor.” In one scene, they are both in silky white blouses, black skirts, gold-rimmed watches on black leather straps and small, neat earrings.
“When Katharine tells Tess, ‘You might rethink your jewelry,’ she not only rethinks, she starts to make some major changes,” Jones said. “That character gets it. If she’s going to leave one place and go to another, she also has to start looking different. It’s all about change and the clothes are part of it.”
Screenwriter Kevin Wade said he got the idea for his script as he stood in Manhattan’s Battery Park one morning. “People were pouring out of holes in the ground (the New York subways) and off the ferry. If you looked right a little bit, you could see Ellis Island where boats brought immigrants years ago.” Wade began to wonder “what is that immigrant story today? What is that land of milk and honey now?”
Tess, modeled after women with running shoes on their feet, high heels in their shoulder bags, could be viewed as “an immigrant every day, coming to the land of opportunity. But there was an invisible class system that would thwart her.”
Questioned about the title “Working Girl,” Wade responded: “Another reporter asked ‘Why the sexist title? Why not “Working Women”?’ She’s a girl through most of the film. It’s part of what she’s fighting against.”
During a research session at Wall Street’s Bear, Stearns & Co., Wade was taken around the company by a 30-year-old broker and vice president. “As part of what he thought I wanted to hear, he looked at the cafeteria line as the women came through, pointing out secretary, executive, executive, secretary, etc., from 25 yards away. The corporate battle atmosphere is a lot like the military. You know someone’s more powerful just by looking at his uniform.”
But unlike Tess, “most of the secretaries I talked to make no attempt to look like the boss,” Wade said. “And why would they? They look great. One girl prided herself on the days when she would wear yellow leather. She got tons of attention from the men in her office.”
In Los Angeles, the corporate battlefield looks different, at least to Jan Ward, manager of the Apple One employment agency in Westwood: “I don’t think there’s that much of a difference nowadays between secretaries and executives. Secretaries think highly of themselves. Their dress reflects that. Everything’s more positive. They’re not even called secretaries, they’re administrative assistants.”
Katharine, Ward said, “dressed in an executive manner, and I think the clothes for her were good but very poor for Tess when she starts out. Maybe that’s the East Coast, but it’s not the way they look in offices here.”
While Tess’ early miniskirts, dark nylons, long hair and brassy jewelry “aren’t professional,” they’re nothing compared with Cyn’s various get-ups: “We’ve never come across anyone who looks like that,” Ward said. “We’ve never seen anyone with hair or eye shadow like that.”
As for the pivotal black velvet: “Boring and definitely not worth $6,000. It was a nice dress, but I don’t know what they thought was so special about it.”
Her favorite items are the other scene stealers: a white crepe Sonia Rykiel ensemble Tess uses to crash an important wedding; the taupe Calvin Klein suit Tess and Katharine share; Katharine’s luxurious white lingerie (Tess, it should be noted, also moves up to luxurious white lingerie), and Katharine’s bright red ski outfit, in which she sails symbolically over a precipice.
Styled by KELLY NEWFIELD
