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It first struck me that the standards of corporate attire had really changed when I went to a meeting with a client who said "Well, when you look around the boardroom table and see someone in a suit, you know who's trying to sell you something."
And of course no one likes salespeople—it makes them think of bad real estate agents or insurance salesmen or door-to-door evangelist types. Except that, in business, we're all salespeople of one kind or another: we're trying to sell ourselves, our company, our product or our services, and we may be trying to sell to our colleagues (for respect), our bosses (for a promotion) or to outside clients (for real money).
The old adage used to be "dress for what you want to be, not for what you are." But the information economy has created a couple of new difficulties for those of us in the service industries: first, the oldest person in the group is not always the most knowledgeable or most experienced; second, in many fields there seems to be an inverse paradigm: the smarter and more talented one is, the less "together" one is expected to appear. In a knowledge-based economy, it's not so much what one wears as what one knows, and the people with the money (i.e. the clients) are beginning to respond to this.
There is simply too much to know—a Fast Company article quoted a 40-something executive saying "In my old-economy job, I thought I was working hard because I worked 10-hour days, five days a week. In my new-economy job, I could work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and still not be able to keep up with everything I needed to know"—in this environment, dressing "for what you want to be" becomes impossible. Who knows what their job is going to be in 12 months or 3 years? We all have to reinvent ourselves constantly.
So now the adage seems to be "Dress for what you are, so I can recognize what the heck you do at this company, because I am too busy trying to keep up with my job to spend any time figuring out whether you are a newly-graduated corporate flunky or a highly-experienced technical geek."
This kind of attitude allows for a great deal more creativity in probably get better results if you dress in a way that helps others recognize your role right off the bat.
In our company (a small ad agency), we originally went to meetings looking fairly homogeneous—not too formal (clients prefer their ad agencies to look a little "hip"), but not too creative, either. However, we found that the clients weren't sure who did what, and didn't know to whom they should direct their questions. So our creative director became a little more inventive (bleaching his hair white and ditching the dress shirts) while our client services people got a little more polished (kept the turtlenecks but put them with suits) and suddenly we had instant credibility. Clients seemed to figure that our creative director must be really, really good in order to dress that outlandishly, but they weren't afraid to sign over the cheques because of the nice, responsible-looking people in suits sitting beside them. And we all knew what everyone else's role was.
We've seen this in other industries as well: as more and more people opt out of big corporations (or are "downsized"), they're having to find their own niche or specialty, and part of communicating that specialty is in the way they dress. If consultants from smaller, specialized consulting firms, for example, show up in navy-blue suits with white shirts, the clients ask themselves "How are these guys so different from Deloitte & Touche? Their suits look kind of expensive—are they going to cost me as much as KPMG? I thought they were supposed to be different—but they don't look it."
The bottom line? In an environment where there is so much to know, it's more important to let others know what you do than it is to look like part of the corporate army. And since others will see you before they hear you, help them out by letting your outfit do some of the talking.
Sarah Welstead
After several years in advertising agencies and internet consulting firms, Sarah started her own ad agency, StayAwake, last year. A member of DigitalEve since 2001, Sarah has written white papers and articles on user experience and networked communications for a number of publications, including Broken Pencil and Harcourt Canada.
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