To wear or not to wear – your personal brand

Seems like “brand” is the topic of the week.  I spoke last night as part of a panel at a “Women in Business” seminar at law firm, Taylor Wessing.  The topic was personal brand.  I kicked off with the following:

“Shirley Bassey sang – “The minute you walked in the joint I could see you were a man of distinction”.  For women it isn’t so easy. A male Australian news anchor wore the same suit for every programme for a year. There were no comments.  His female colleague regularly receives comments on what she wears. (see here, especially for her brilliant response).  Margaret Thatcher changed her dress style drastically and lowered her vocal register and Angela Merkel wears black trousers and what looks like the same tailored jacket in different colours every day. We have almost stopped looking at what she is wearing because it is unremarkable.

Some orchestras have blind auditions where the player is behind a screen so that the judgment is made solely on performance – that is unlikely to happen anywhere else. When you walk into a room or up on the podium – people make snap judgments in the first 30 seconds – not intentionally, not accurately, it isn’t fair ...   but that’s the way it is. 

So if we are talking about your personal brand – how you look counts and it is much more complicated than in the 70s when John Molloy published a book called Dress For Success for Women when the boundaries between business and casual dress were clearer. When I left the City I opened my wardrobe and there were the suits – black, charcoal, navy.  On the other hand when I was Chief Executive of Breast Cancer Campaign, wherever possible I wore pink, the more dark suits there were in the room, the more visible I was.”

The rest of the presentation and much of the discussion covered a wide range of issues around personal brand but what was glaringly obvious when you walked into that room is that 90% of the women (including me!) were wearing black and this provoked quite a discussion.

One of our hosts spoke about Barack Obama who wears the same style of suit every day because he has enough decisions to make and doesn’t want to have to think about what he wears. He is not alone – Mark Zuckerberg and Albert Einstein the same. Gary Player has always worn all black and that was quite shocking amongst the lurid colours on the golf course. The great British dress designer, Jean Muir, wore black in winter and navy in summer and Grace Coddington (Vogue) only wears all black. 

There are two motivations here – the first is not to have to think about what you are going to wear and the second is to make a statement.  Obama and Merkel don’t want to think about what they are going to wear and are taking your attention beyond what they are wearing. Player and Coddington are perhaps making a statement.

If you want your audience to move beyond what you are wearing I am afraid that it needs to be unremarkable in the specific environment – unless you want to make a statement and build this into your personal brand – Suzy Menkes’ rather strange hairstyle is an example – but then she is in the fashion business.