Zara Brownless won Young Apprentice on Monday night, but never mind her amazing presentation skills. What really caught the public imagination was that dress: white, cut a bit like Roland Mouret's Galaxy, with a square neck, power-pleated sleeves and a brook-no-arguments waistline that made Brownless look sharper than her sloppy fellow finalist James McCullagh. The only downside to the dress was that it threatened to usurp her. "Will the white dress be out tonight?" tweeted Marblond-Tweets before the final and, after Brownless had won, Lord Sugar advised on Twitter: "First thing to do with £25k is to buy a new dress in Zara."
Actually, she bought it from Asos, months ago. And despite the online outrage about its weekly presence in the boardroom (what's wrong with a trademark?), the dress underlined her maturity. Brownless seemed to have decoded the sartorial language of so many women in business since Mouret launched his Galaxy in 2005: if you want to be taken seriously, you need a dress that is structured and sharp, and shapely enough to make the structure and sharpness seem soft. But still, every week? "You don't want to ruin a good streak, do you?" she says.
