Why Good Girls Don't Get Ahead_. But Gutsy Girls Do - Kate White [57]
Do you remember Dress for Success by John Molloy? If you've been in the workforce less than twelve years, you might not be familiar with it but you may have felt its effect indirectly. Mr. Molloy's book was primarily a guide for men, but he threw in tips for women that profoundly influenced how the majority of working women showed up at the office for many years afterwards. Here's the kind of advice he was offering:
There is one firm and dramatic step women can take toward professional equality with men. They can adopt a business uniform. Beyond any doubt the uniform should be a skirted suit and blouse. In most cases the suit should be dark and the blouse should contrast. It should not be pinched at the waist to exaggerate the bust. Colors avoided should be bright red, bright orange, and bright anything else.
Mr. Molloy also said in his book that the dress is the “ultimate seduction garment.”
It was in response to such gospel that millions of women like me donned dark, man-tailored suits, white shirts, and floppy bow ties that not only made us all look alike but resulted in our never being able to walk down the aisle of an airplane without being asked for a pillow or an extra bottle of Mr and Mrs T Bloody Mary mix.
Molloy didn't intend anything malicious. He was just trying to help women by putting us in uniforms that he believed would make it easier for men to accept our presence in the office.
The trouble is that Molloy played into the good-girl part of our nature by telling us that if we didn't follow the rules, we would fail or at the very least be called a slut. Times, of course, have changed. The floppy bow tie has gone the way of the poor boy sweater and Mr. Molloy has deleted the above advice from his book. Yet many of us still err on the side of caution when we dress because those old words are in the back of our heads.
Confusing matters even more is the fact that there are no contemporary guidelines around to replace what Molloy said. There are only two things we can be reasonably sure of today:
1. Different companies, different industries, and different parts of the country vary significantly in their dress codes. Those codes are often unwritten and not always clear.
2. If you wear a red blazer to an industry conference, it's a safe bet to say that at least 60 percent of the other women in the room will have one on, too.
Though there are no hard-and-fast rules these days, these are the basic guidelines I believe a gutsy girl should dress by:
• Always, always dress as if you were in the job you aspire to. This advice has been spoken many times before, but good girls don't always adhere to it. They fear that they'll seem too presumptuous dressing “powerfully.” Don't worry if a few of your co-workers give you a who-does-she-think-she-is? look when you walk in wearing a $400 suit that you spent your last dime on. The people making the decisions will be impressed.
• If you're not good at dressing yourself, turn yourself over to someone who can do it for you. One option, of course, is to use the personal shopper at a department store—though buyer beware: many of them tend to go overboard. I tried the personal shopper route and I ended up posing for several weeks as a sixty-five-year-old matron from Greenwich. Connecticut. What finally worked for me was to find a couple of designers whose clothes always looked great on me and I never buy anything else.
• Be gutsy enough to pack away the red blazers. Just as the navy suit and floppy tie formed a business uniform in the late seventies, the bold red or color-blocked jacket took its place in the fast-paced eighties. That kind of look may have gotten women noticed at one point, but now it's almost as much a uniform as the old one. And the accessories that get piled on with this look—pins, scarves, bracelets—can make you appear like an overdecorated room in a designer show house.Kendall Farr, who was my fashion editor at Working Woman, says that a far classier and more distinctive look is one of understated elegance. It starts with a simple but perfectly