If you are too busy being taken seriously as an important grownup to read a fashion column, then you are exactly the person who needs to read this. I promise I won’t waste a moment of your precious time wittering on about ruffles, or parsing the modern rules on how to wear velvet. (Psst, fellow non-serious-grownups: for the modern rules on velvet, see you same place next week.)
What you need to know is this. The dress to wear when you want to be taken seriously is not what you think it is. This is what I mean. I’m going to take a guess about the dress you wear to work on days when you’ve got a crucial meeting, or a major presentation, or a new boss starting. I bet it’s some version of a sheath dress: sleek, minimally detailed, in a block colour. It’s not tight, but it’s fitted. Hemline within three inches of the knee, up or down. It’s probably in a neutral grey or navy, bought as an update on a similar one you had a few years back which was lipstick red or petrol blue and had a zip running all the way up the back. (Secretly, you quite miss the one with the zip, although with the benefit of hindsight it was a tiny bit slutty.)
This dress has done us all proud until now. It has been a dress to work miracles, a day dress for the big time, a dress that did fierce and feminine at the same time. A dress in which women felt good and which sent a message to men, loud and clear: don’t think for a minute, mister, that being female puts me at a disadvantage.
But the fitted sheath dress has become a lazy shorthand for power dressing, reproduced too often and too widely and too badly. If you are still wearing it, the message you are sending is that you are slightly off your game. To sharpen up your look, loosen your dress. A less body-conscious, more architectural shape looks more confident, more dynamic, more in-the-know. Not saggy or droopy: make the silhouette less fitted, but keep it sharp.
Right, meeting concluded. Action points: possible new dress. Your workstream. Get to it.
• Jess wears shirt, £34, topshop.com. Dress, £69, cosstores.com. Shoes, £60, office.co.uk
Styling: Melanie Wilkinson. Hair and makeup: Laurence Close at Carol Hayes Management
