JANET STREET-PORTER: Women fought for the right to dress as we please
JANET STREET-PORTER: Women fought for the right to dress as we please. So how dare the ‘Diva of Divorce’ tell female lawyers they have to put on their glad rags if they want get ahead
If the most important dates in your life are getting married, getting divorced and buying a place to live, would you be happy if the lawyer handling your affairs turned up in a sequinned crop top and flares?
Or maybe that controversial fake fur coat worn by Naomi Campbell in Paris this week which featured a huge she-wolf on one shoulder? Great if you want to scare everyone off, not so great if you’re seeking a friendly result.
For years, ambitious women have relied on a well-cut suit to ensure they are taken seriously at work. Not anymore.
In fact, the new rules mean they might do better dressing like Katie Price or someone whose real job is pouring tequila slammers in a nightclub. Or Doja Cat, whose face and body were embellished with 30,000 scarlet sequins at the Schiaparelli couture show in Paris the other day?
JANET STREET-PORTER: According to Ayesha Vardag (pictured), suits belong to ‘bankers and estate agents’. She wants her staff to be able to express themselves and says gold leather trousers, scarlet Doc Martens, pink hair are all OK, adding: ‘Be as wildly fabulous as you like’
Once, the legal profession was the bastion of power dressing, but not anymore. This week, staff at top divorce lawyers Vardags were told by their boss they should dress like members of a high-end club, and forget wearing anything as conventional as a smart suit.
According to Ayesha Vardag, suits belong to ‘bankers and estate agents’. She wants her staff to be able to express themselves and says gold leather trousers, scarlet Doc Martens, pink hair are all OK, adding: ‘Be as wildly fabulous as you like’.
Ayesha – known as the ‘diva of divorce’ – specialises in high-profile break-ups, and won a landmark court case in 2010 which ensured pre-nuptial agreements are legally enforceable in England and Wales.
Her company offers some of the most expensive legal advice around and clients include billionaires and royalty. They help rich people hang on to even more of their money when they separate from their partners.
Unfortunately her latest ‘briefing’ was greeted with derision in legal quarters. One wag commented ‘at least her staff do not have to dress like BA cabin crew, the look the managing partner seems to have perfected’. Miaow!
Another wrote: ‘A PR disaster…she’s more concerned about her staff than her profitability’.
To be fair, Ms Vardag has a brilliant reputation, and has fought and won huge settlements for her female clients. Unfortunately, she has a reputation for being a stickler who micromanages every aspect of her teams’ lives.
Only a few years ago, she sent out an irate email because someone had been spotted in the office WEARING A CARDIGAN!
Incandescent because her high standards had been breached, she fumed ‘woollies are verboten’. The furore that resulted was dubbed ‘Vardigan-gate’.
Before she opened the flood gates to leather trousers and pink hair, Ayesha decreed that female staff should aspire to look as if they had been dressed by Dior, Chanel or Armani. Now she’s thrown caution (and tailoring) out of the window.
Having been divorced four times, I’m not sure I would have achieved the same result if my barrister had turned up in bondage trousers with a safety pin through his ear.
JANET STREET-PORTER: Would you be happy if the lawyer handling your affairs turned up in a sequined crop top and flares? Or maybe that controversial fake fur coat worn by Naomi Campbell (pictured) in Paris this week which featured a huge she-wolf on one shoulder? Great if you want to scare everyone off, not so great if you’re seeking a friendly result
Legal advice is costly, and the stakes are high. I might sound like a dreary reactionary, but someone in a sharp suit is more likely to get the result you want.
In the 21st century, it seems bizarre that dress codes exist at all outside the court room. Since Covid, working from home has meant that most of us spend our days in elasticated leisurewear, only bothering to dress formally above the waist when attending a meeting via Zoom.
And yet, when you venture out at night, it’s another matter entirely. Try and enter most of the top private London dining rooms and members’ clubs – mostly started by people who were once flogging cheap frocks for a living – and you will find that snobbery has been reinvented to keep out the unwashed and unwanted.
Ayesha Vardag might be scrapping the old dress code, but there’s an equally restrictive new one in play when it comes to eating and drinking.
Women fought for equality, and the right to dress as we please.
READ MORE JANET STREET-PORTER: Beware the rage of a big brother (or sister): Sibling rivalry drove me to push my little sister down the stairs – that’s why I sympathise with William over his ‘attack’ on Harry in the Battle of the Dog Bowl
Sibling rivalry – as described in Harry’s bombshell memoir Spare – has never been more ruthlessly exposed in all its nit-picking detail
But if we want to eat a burger and chips (or a baked potato filled with caviare) in some posh postcodes, then we better not wear trainers, jeans, leather jackets or crop tops.
A new generation of restaurant, bar and club owners have decided to mimic the frowsy old buffers who set the rules in London’s men-only clubs a century ago, coming up with their own bonkers dress codes, designed to exclude anyone whose face doesn’t fit. But if you’re rich and famous, it doesn’t seem to matter.
It’s confusing and frustrating to say the least. Instead of enjoying a night out, you wonder whether you will get past the imperious doorman.
At Christmas I refused an invitation to go to lunch at the traditional Reform Club in London’s Pall Mall, because I received a note beforehand telling me trainers were banned ‘unless the wearer produces a note saying they are being worn for medical reasons’. Jeans and denim were also banned.
The idea of obtaining medical advice in order to eat a slab of lukewarm turkey and over cooked vegetables seemed daft, so I stayed at home and had a sandwich in my slippers instead.
I had been told that this once-fusty male run establishment now welcomed women and counted some famous females among its members. But if women made up 50% of the management board, I am sure these out of date rules about trainers would no longer apply. They are just a form of discrimination, pure and simple.
It’s not that surprising that clubs established a hundred years ago as sanctuaries where men could avoid women (unless they were waitresses) and drink themselves into a stupor with other men might be reluctant to move with the times, but it seems bizarre that newer establishments should want to dream up their own complicated rules in order to appear ‘exclusive’.
Annabel’s, which Ms Vardag cites as having the kind of dress code she admires – ‘smart and elegant’ – has a strict dress code dreamt up by its owner, Richard Caring.
Night after night reality show stars parade on the pavement outside these clubs, revealing their 16th boob jobs, their surgically-enhanced bums, their droopy side boobs and everything in-between. As long as they are not wearing trainers, then I suppose it’s ok.
Another dining club in Mayfair, Harry’s Bar, issues a dress code which states ‘no trainers, no leather, no denim’….and on and on.
Invited to a lovely birthday dinner there, I spent the evening fearful of being turfed out for daring to wear immaculate trainers under my long skirt.
As for workwear, I’m worried that my new grey woollen suit by Sportmax, purchased at vast expense as my Xmas present to myself, will never come out of the wardrobe because it sends the wrong message.
In short, is looking ‘business-like’ out of date in 2023? Might that explain our current economic woes?
Source: Read Full Article