ABSTRACT
In the British edition of his dress manual, Women: Dress for Success, John T. Molloy proclaimed that most women ‘dress for failure’: either they let fashion dictate their choice of clothes, or they see themselves as sex objects, or they dress according to their socio-economic background. All three ways of dressing prevent women gaining access to positions of power in the business and corporate world. In order to succeed in a man's world of work, the business or executive woman's ‘only alternative is to let science help them choose their clothes’ (Molloy 1980: 18). The science of clothing management which he practised and called ‘wardrobe engineering’ helped introduce and establish the ‘power dressing’ phenomenon of the 1980s, defining a style of female professional garb which has now become something of a sartorial cliche; tailored skirt suit with shoulder pads, in grey, blue or navy, accessorised with ‘token female garb such as bows and discreet jewellery’ (Armstrong 1993: 278). Whilst Molloy might not have been the first, and indeed was far from the only self-proclaimed ‘expert’ to define a ‘uniform’ for the business or executive woman, his manual remains a classic explication of the rules of ‘power dressing’. Molloy's manual, and his ‘power suit’ as it came to be known, provoked a good deal of discussion on both sides of the Atlantic and spawned an array of articles in newspapers and magazines, all of which served to establish a discourse on how the so-called career woman should dress for work.
