The Wall Street Journal-20080124-On Style -- Women in Power- Finding Balance In the Wardrobe
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080124
On Style -- Women in Power: Finding Balance In the Wardrobe
Say the word "pantsuit" these days, and everyone knows whom you are talking about.
Never has fashion been so prominent in a presidential election. The reason, of course, is that one of the pants-wearing candidates is female.
Women in positions of authority, from Washington to Wall Street, face fashion scrutiny that's so intense it can border on comical -- though it's serious business to the women, their organizations and, it turns out, lots of working women.
Female politicians in particular are becoming sartorial role models. Nowadays, women who want to be taken seriously look to Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Condoleezza Rice for style cues, much the way young women have long followed the lead of the celebrity set.
At the St. John fall 2008 runway show this week, a publicist for the iconic power-woman design house gushed that the U.S. Secretary of State "loves St. John." The publicist, who also touted the fact that Mrs. Clinton has worn St. John in the past, noted with regret that designers can't give clothes to political candidates as they bestow gowns and bags on actresses because the candidates would have to report them as political gifts. Just imagine Oscars-style gifting suites in our nation's capital: Alpha-woman designers like Armani, Akris, Oscar de la Renta and jeweler David Yurman would do a big business.
Enough women are paying attention to what female politicians wear that it has affected sales of at least one signature style. Kirsten Wolff, executive vice president of the Web retailer PearlParadise.com, told me recently that sales of pearl jewelry rise when Ms. Pelosi and other woman politicos wear it on C-Span: People actually call up and ask for duplicate pieces.
Female business leaders may play to a smaller audience, but the examination they face can be just as rigorous. According to unwritten rules, their appearance at work should be attractive but not alluring, feminine but not girly, strong but not severe. In both politics and the executive suite, they face hazier, harder-to-meet style standards than men. "We are looked at and dissected very differently than men are," says Joyce Newman, founder of the Newman Group consulting organization in New York. "That's unfair."
"I know I'm being assessed for my clothing and what I wear," says Kathryn Marinello, chairman and chief executive of Ceridian Corp., who took the human-resources company private in a $5 billion deal last November. She is a veteran executive of General Electric Co. and the banking industry. Yet like many female chief executives, she tends to keep her attention to style under wraps. "You hate even talking about it because it's such a woman thing," she says.
High-ranking women on Wall Street in particular are a thinly traded commodity, and they quickly learn to keep their fashion issues in the closet. In fact, most don't like the word "fashion."
Instead, many women focus on practicality. Michaela Jedinak, a London-based media and entertainment lawyer who advises executives on communications and style, says women need "hard-wearing" clothing that won't look sloppy and wrinkled by late afternoon. Don't wear make-up that has to be reapplied, she suggests, because it will make you too "self-conscious."
The attention brought to clothing is a two-edged sword for authoritative women everywhere. A style misstep can be career- limiting. Yet paying too much attention to one's appearance risks accusations of frivolity -- which is equally career-limiting.
Carly Fiorina writes in her memoir, "Tough Choices," of being questioned by a BusinessWeek editor during her first week as chief executive of technology giant Hewlett-Packard Co. in 1999. There was a technological revolution going on in Silicon Valley, but the first question lobbed her way was: "Is that an Armani suit you're wearing?" Ms. Fiorina, who discusses her frustration with style scrutiny in her book, declined a request for an interview for this column.
Hollywood offers few helpful ideals. In two new power-women shows, ABC's "Cashmere Mafia" and NBC's "Lipstick Jungle," the characters lounge around in gowns and display cleavage to their belly buttons. Amanda Ross, stylist for "Lipstick Jungle," notes people look to Hollywood "for wish fulfillment -- a little bit of daringness."
Ms. Ross, who has also worked with real women as a style consultant, notes that in real life, unlike in Hollywood, dressing powerful women means choosing designers for how their clothes fit rather than for their fashion quotient.
Oddly enough, several communications consultants told me it's mostly male executives who hire them for advice on grooming and attire. Women, by contrast, "don't understand that the things that shouldn't matter count as much as they do," says Dee Soder, a psychologist and founder of the executive-coaching firm CEO Perspective Group in New York.
Helpful feedback rarely reaches female executives' ears, because people are loath to discuss work attire directly with the wearer. Dr. Soder says she is often hired just to deliver a fashion message for an executive who quails from the duty. She once was hired to tell a company president that he needed new shirts, preferably with French cuffs. Another time, she was hired to tell a female advertising executive to wear less perfume.
Ms. Newman of the Newman Group says she was once hired by a male executive to help a female executive whom he found "too masculine because in meetings she put her feet on chairs and didn't wear lipstick."
Perhaps the focus on style reflects people's difficulty coming to terms with women in positions of real authority. Hence, Mrs. Clinton's now famous "humanizing moment," on the verge of tears in New Hampshire, may have balanced her oft-criticized regime of pantsuits in the eyes of some voters.
One of the first things Ms. Marinello did when she took the top job at Ceridian in 2006 was to hire Ms. Newman to advise her on her wardrobe, grooming and presentation skills. They spent a day on hair and makeup and went shopping for clothes at St. John's and Saks, where they focused on practical clothes, like suits and jackets that travel well. ("Think knit," says Ms. Newman.)
This was no girl-talk afternoon -- they also discussed how to present quarterly financial results to shareholders. With authority comes responsibility. Ms. Marinello was keenly aware that Ceridian's future rested on her lapels.
"If you're asking someone to lend you $3 billion, you'd better look good," she says.
---
Email [email protected]
