How can fashion endow a woman with confidence? This recent article from Vogue.com shares the domination of power suits.
The idea that fashion could empower women to accomplish more—in all of their changing roles—stretches back to the streamlined innovations of the 1920s, when women were liberated from their corsets. And it gained major ground during the women’s movement of the 1970s, when pants became the daily uniform of a generation of Charlie girls. But it undoubtedly reached its apogee in the 1980s, with the rise and eventual world domination of the power suit.
“The women here, the women everywhere, talk about a new confidence,”[1] Vogue reported in 1983, in a fashion portfolio called “The New Active Style,” which featured suits designed to carry the wearer seamlessly from her executive position in the Financial District to her position behind a baby carriage in Central Park.
The phrase power dressing was first brought to the public’s attention in the mid-1970s by John T. Molloy. A good wardrobe, he argued in his Dress for Success books, doesn’t necessarily turbocharge your career—but a poor one invariably will sink it. The silver-bullet solution of the power-dressing concept was a suit that exaggerated a woman’s shoulders, giving her a more aggressive and masculine silhouette. Women were encouraged to appropriate and adapt menswear to endow themselves with an aura of authority. Typically, the power suit had two matching pieces—initially, just skirts on bottom, but later trousers were advised—in a color that meant business: black, gray, blue (navy or pale), or perhaps beige. The jacket was oversize, often double-breasted, with shoulders that extended well beyond the contours of the natural body. A white shirt with a floppy bow tie, along with nude hosiery and basic pumps, completed the look.
Like the European automobiles that yuppies coveted because they made the driver look not just rich but influential and important, the power suit made a woman look like she was somebody. “A suit is a power suit when you arrive, at a board meeting or a hotel, and everybody takes note. You are nicely greeted, they know who you are,”[2] Renate Gunthert, designer of the German Rena Lange collection, has said.
The names most associated with the trend were: Giorgio Armani, who was famous for his unstructured look, with softer jackets elegantly suspended from wide, sloping shoulders; and Donna Karan, who gave it a slightly sexier spin, adding wrap skirts, for instance, and more curves. Also major players in the power game were Liz Claiborne, Ann Taylor, and Calvin Klein. At the time, there was a stricter divide between the clothing styles of the subculture and those favored by the mainstream, and everyone who was anyone in the established corridors of power—from Hollywood to Milan to Washington—wanted to be seen sipping Perrier with a dash of Campari in a linen or silk designer suit.
The transformative powers of the suit were taken as a given by the mid-eighties. When Melanie Griffith—playing the Aqua Net–addicted, wise-talking outer-boroughs kid in the 1988 movie Working Girl—plotted her rise up from the secretarial pool, she started by raiding her boss’s closet for a chic black suit (and taming her big hair).
By the turn of the next decade, however, the idea of power dressing was becoming an anachronism. “The message of competence and confidence sent by the woman in a gray pin-striped suit has been received,” Vogue reported in January 1990, “and the majority of designers feel it’s time to move on.”[3] Women no longer believed their career trajectory had to be predicated on the appropriation of masculine gestures. Power, after all, should come as naturally to talented women as it does to talented men. Shoulder pads went out. Jackets grew smaller and smaller. (Eventually, around 2000, they would ultimately reach the “shrunken” stage: With the narrowest of shoulders, and shorter, tighter sleeves, they hit at the hipbone, not the upper thigh.)
No one, these days, questions the tenet that fashion can endow a woman with confidence. We all understand that clothing can be worn like a costume, or armor, to help us do battle in the social or career sphere. “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have,” people say. . . . But the Zeitgeist’s dream job is no longer on Wall Street.
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