How SEXY can you look in an office and still be appropriately dressed?
Or never mind being appropriately dressed. How sexy can you look and still further your career? Lovely as cleavage is (if you’re lucky enough to have it), we don’t want it—or them—spoiling your chances to succeed. Don’t scoff! One executive I know may be speaking for many when he says that he loves seeing acres of raw bosoms on the stage or at cocktail parties, but across a crowded desk he gets that “wet flounder” feeling.
If you’re clever, however, you can have it all—success, the look of a lady and an air of devout sexiness right in the no-nonsense precincts of an office.
First, let’s define what a sexy look is. For a girl, being sexy is simply a matter of liking men enormously and being glad she’s a girl. That’s all there is to that! Yes, of course, certain little squiggles and squaggles contribute to a sexy look and we’ll get to those, but if people can say about you, “She dresses beautifully,” that’s tantamount to their saying, “She dresses sexily.”
Some girls are sexy who don’t dress beautifully, of course, but I believe they’re sexy in spite of the way they dress. They’d be even more alluring—tight sweaters and forgotten bras notwithstanding—if they also dressed in elegant taste. Lady sexpots—Balenciaga-gowned movie stars, society girls and the like—are in far greater demand than trollopy-looking girls.
Your aim, then, is to dress beautifully. Within that framework, what can you and what can’t you get away with in an office? Aren’t there some never-nevers? Yes. Rhinestones, sequins, slinky-slinky black, tiers of organdy, miles of lace, clankety-clank jewels, the fragiles, the wispies and the see-throughs are out. What do you care when gone-mad colors, sensuous silks, huggy-bear wools, starchy piques, maddening plaids, shocking chic and clothes that fit like hot wax are in? Who needs rhinestones?
There was a time, of course, when all managements preferred a little brown wren at every desk. Around 1908 it was thought daredevil enough for girls to be in offices without calling attention to their faces and figures. Things really have changed since then, though some people aren’t aware of it. In her book, Manners in Business, Elizabeth Gregg McGibbon advises the executive secretary, “Make yourself as inconspicuous as possible.” Really! What boss, pray, who has gone to the ends of the earth to hire the most dazzling girl he can find wants to have to locate her with a divining rod when he’s ready to dictate? If a striking appearance really disturbed him, a girl with large mammary glands would have to wear a suit of armor, and you know any boss with a secretary who did that would shoot himself—or spend his entire day keeping track of his can-opener.
Of course we don’t want you to be the girl about whom men poke each other in the ribs and say, “Hey, Charlie, you ought to drop around and get a load of Bertie Lamson today . . . leopard culottes!” What we do want them to say or think about you is that you’re delicious and chic and that you look good enough to eat—or to take to eat at Perino’s or “21.” How can you look this way? Gerry Stutz, the entrancing president of Henri Bendel, says, “First you have to figure out what you really look like. I’m convinced half the women who shop frantically for clothes on their lunch hours haven’t any idea.” If you can’t quite catalog yourself, Miss Stutz suggests that you ask a close friend or loved one to help you. No letting them gloss anything over, however. An editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal even suggests you put a sack over your head with two holes cut out for eyes when you do this figure analysis.
This is what you have to discern. Are you a short, curvy little cat, a boyish elf of a girl (some of them are the sexpots of the world), a statuesque, womanly woman like the kind carved on Grecian boat fronts? Do you have short legs, long legs, short torso, long torso, bulky rib cage, small rib cage, slopy shoulders, square shoulders—or what do you have? It’s important to know. If you’re 5’1” and hippy, you shouldn’t be prowling around with a leggy, Diana-the-Huntress vision of you in your head because you’ll buy all the wrong things. Once you understand your figure—what you really look like—you’re more apt to reach for the clothes that will flatter it. Then, within the range of clothes that are great for your figure, you may also begin to buy with an “image” in mind. Depending on whether you naturally reach for Alex jersey, heathery tweeds, or Bianchini silk, you can evolve as a temple temptress, misty-moors and Great Danes creature or sixteenth century drawing-room charmer . . . yes, even at the office. There is just no end to “image” possibilities.
After you know what you look like and have picked an “image,” Miss Stutz says there are endless people and things that will help you acquire taste—fashion magazines, newspaper fashion pages (getting better and better), the well-dressed women you see and copy, plus store windows and fashion shows, even museums, movies and theater costuming. Anne Klein, designer of some of the sexiest but most elegant working-girl clothes in the world (Junior Shopis-ticates), thinks a great salesgirl is a working girl’s best friend. If you can find one who understands you and your needs and who also has taste, she’ll call you when your kind of clothes come into the store.
But what’s all this about following fashion when you’re supposed to be dressing to please men? Please believe me, the way you please men is by dressing to please you, provided your taste is good. Following fashion keeps your taste honed—it just works out that way!
As for the claim that fashion isn’t sexy because designers are all mincing homosexuals who hate women and try to make them look like little boys—hogwash! Marc Bohan of Dior did a jeweled bodice last season scooped out so low in front one reporter said the bosoms could not only be seen but heard. This is looking like a boy? (Besides, the homosexuals I know adore girls—they just don’t want to go to bed with them.) Speaking of bosoms, if you look fashionably chic and dress like a lady nearly every day at the office, you can, on occasion, get away with murder! One fine April day you can appear in a peek-a-boo Restoration Period neckline that would have them thinking any less well-dressed girl had flipped her lid. Thanks to your year-round reputation for impeccable taste, on you they figure the neckline is simply the latest! Ladies get away with things. Let me illustrate.
A young advertising executive I know was being wooed by another agency and had dinner with the wooing agency’s head at his sumptuous home. As the men sipped cocktails and talked of split commissions and creative media buys, the wooing agency head’s wife sat quietly in a wicker chair sipping her own Pimm’s Cup No. 3. All of a sudden, the chap being proselytized said he nearly fainted mid-discussion as he glanced over at his hostess and found he could see straight up her dress. She was wearing tangerine lace underthings. “If she’d been a hoyden . . .” he said. “But Mrs. Sinclair (we’ll call her) is fourth-generation Sinclair banking stock. Furthermore she looks like Grace Kelly.” When he looked again, he said, the show was over. The lady’s legs were pristinely crossed at the ankle, and that’s the last such glimpse he’s had from that day to this. He took the job, of course!
Lady Thunderbolt Number 2: A young Radcliffe-graduate copy-cub came to lunch with some men and me in Chinatown one day. We were used to seeing her in her good littie Lanz cottons, but this particular day she had belted one of her good little Lanz’s tightly in to her twenty-two-inch waist and left the dress-top unbuttoned to one and a half inches above the belt. The bodice fit snugly and she was small bosomed so you couldn’t really see anything, but what pandemonium! She had the fellows falling into their lobster Cantonese.
These may sound like the desperate measures of latent nymphomaniacs to you. I think these were ladies enjoying the prerogatives of being ladies . . . raising temperatures without raising eyebrows.
In twenty-two years of being a working woman, I’ve never doubted that dressing beautifully for the office is worth it. Many a man in the office has just left his wife at home in a wrapper. It may cheer him two thousand per cent just to look at you, and some of that cheer may rub off on your career.
Now for a few specifics.
Men adore color. They respond to it like the Moiseyev Ballet at the first blast of a good chardas. As Bruce Clerke, managing editor of Ladies Home Journal and a former editor of Harpers Bazaar, says, “Think how often men describe you in terms of color—the girl in the red dress, the one in the blue suit.” Wear lots of color. Wear more color in winter. Miss Clerke sometimes wears a mustard skirt, cranberry blouse and powder-blue cardigan.
Suits are much overrated for working girls! They’re expensive. Most offices are too warm to work in with your jacket on, so what are you left with—a blouse and a skirt! Besides, fifty-two per cent of the suits seen in offices say to a man, “I want you to understand that I’m a nice girl... a nice dull girl!”
Suits square you off—boxy little jackets, boxy little skirts. And goodness knows, they usually fatten you. If you’re a suity type have suits. Every girl should have one or two good ones in her wardrobe for important luncheons and such. If you aren’t altogether the suity type, however, as many rounded girls aren’t, stop feeling you’ve failed Coco Chanel. Whether you have many or a few suits, I think each one should be a “really something” that you can wear for at least five years. Little dressmaker suits are for little dressmakers!
Dresses are much more becoming to rounded girls than suits, in my opinion, and with a coat or jacket they make an important ensemble. A career girl who also deprecates suits describes her fabulous working wardrobe: “I have a clutch of wool dresses that would get me by anywhere . . . little nothing wools, bell-skirted wools, no-sleeve wools, leotard-sleeve wools, simple, printed, plain, sophisticated, sleek, fluffy-puffy and casual wools. I have them in all colors and they all cost more than a little dress should! In summer the ‘clutch’ consists of no-crush linen, cotton and silk.”
It’s a myth that grew up in the Depression that you can make one dress look like thirty-two different ones. There’s usually one best way to accessorize a dress or suit—so you keep right on doing it that way with the same emerald pin and long pearls. The “dress” girl we just heard from says, “My basics are things that are always ready to stand on their own and go—my five-year-old black and white tweed suit, an olive Italian knit, a tiger-print linen with matching chiffon scarf.” My own favorite “basic” is a red and green plaid wool dress from Jax (who makes madly sexy dresses) with empire lines. It’s five years old but always says, “Put me on. I’m becoming. I’m sophisticated. I’m your ‘image.’ I don’t show dirt or wrinkles. I’m warm and you know how cold you get.” How much more basic should anything be?
Many a girl in recent years has dedicated herself to the cult of understatement. Not a button, not a bow, not a collar, not a cuff, not a sleeve, not a pocket, not a welt, not a belt, not a gather. As the perceptive Hearst columnist Suzy says, “You can understate yourself right out of business.”
Simplicity and dull colors may be your cup of tea. I happen to adore little charcoal wools and unadorned black myself, but I hope they all say, “You Tarzan, me Jane.” And I hope, for the love of heaven, you do come out in something colorful once in a while! Men usually respond wildly. “Why don’t you wear pink all the time?” they beg. Or, “I love your crazy zig-zag dress.” A dress never overshadows a girl who isn’t shadowy to begin with.
There are days, of course, when you don’t feel like blossoming out in your cherry-blossom and mango silk print. You feel more like wearing a pall. Don’t force! There should be a couple of things in your wardrobe in which you can “hide out” and still be reasonably chic.
Ann Pearson, Special Events Director of Burdine’s Department Store in Miami, says, “I don’t believe any woman admitting to twenty and a half should be caught dead in the city in a skirt and blouse. They give you that httle-office-drone-that-nothing-good-is-going-to-happen-to look. The possible exception,” says Ann, “might be a hand-loomed Irish Tweed skirt and snowy linen shirt with every baby stitch put in by hand. Even so, the outfit would be better for Sunday afternoon at the chateau.”
Amen! If you’re a blouse and skirt or sweater and skirt addict and can’t break the habit, at least have some good little jackets—velveteen, paisley, cotton brocade—to go along and complete you
I think one reason many coats are so boring is that girls buy them too big. Then they just sort of mush around in them looking like Napoleon’s men at St. Petersburg trying to keep warm. I always buy coats a size smaller than my dress size. That way they are as short, spare and peppy as coats ought to be. I suggest you try it too.
There’s nothing wrong with junk jewelry usually, only the junk collector’s arrangements! What you do with jewelry is often what separates girls with taste buds from girls without any. When you’re all dressed up, made up and ready to go, add the pin or the beads. Look coldly and slant-eyed at yourself in the mirror. Did you look better before you added them? You aren’t sure? Take the pin and beads off again. Put them on again. If they get to go with you, they should be pulling their weight in chic.
Don’t be afraid to throw out nearly all the jewelry you own and stick with a few things that are great. This gets to be a particularly good idea when you’re over thirty-five. Wearing one great pin four days in a row is better than changing to nothing-burger clinkers. If a particular color of jewelry isn’t becoming—even something as basic as silver, gold or rhinestones—rule it out.
Men complain about girls who clank, so be careful about bracelets banging together when you work.
If you can’t afford a beautiful wristwatch yet, I suggest keeping your Mickey Mouse or sweet-girl-graduate black and gold one in your purse to be used to tell time only. High school class rings and crumby wristwatches say you aren’t ready for lovely business-world things to happen to you.
What could be sounder than several pairs of black leather pumps for winter (and who cares if they all look alike), several black patents for summer, and that’s it! Shoe-fetish girls are going to think this pretty dull, but really you need long-stemmed American-Beauty legs and dazzling feet to warrant calling attention to them with buckles, baubles and bows. You could make one of your winter black pairs black alligator and one of your summer pairs bone if you’re that bored.
All your shoes should be kept in first-rate repair. As one elegant career girl puts it, “Girls knock themselves out to wear sexy dresses, and their shoes look as though they’d been hoeing potatoes in them. They pretend nobody notices, but everybody notices.” Agreed. Black leather shoes are the easiest of all to make new again. Once the silken toes of blue and green striped silk sandals are slubbed, they’re stubbed. If you’re a green-, blue-, red-, or fuschia-shoe girl to the death, however, the new little bottles of dye correct scuffs in these colors.
High-heels or mid-heels are about as low as you should go in the office. I would never wear anything lower from portal to portal. You do have an audience. If you’re going to be on your feet all day, bring flats to change into (if your office doesn’t frown). Forty-nine cent Japanese straw scuffs are comfy.
Something about a run says, “Naughty, careless, slovenly girl,” when you had nothing to do with it but supplying the legs for the hose to run on. Keep an extra pair of stockings in your desk and change quickly. If you chase around a lot, a pair in brief case or glove compartment is handy too.
If you’re paying more than ninety-nine cents a pair for hose, you’re a spendthrift.
Most purses stay in, on, or under a girl’s desk all day. Why, then, do they have to be sensational and different every day? Even if you visit the outside world, I think one good black leather bag for winter and a patent for summer are sufficient. Who has time to re-equip a new purse every morning?
Men are a little suspicious of hats, either because they’re jealous (I’m serious—they never get to wear anything nearly so fancy or beautiful) or because hats say garden parties and ladies’ luncheons to them. You have to watch too much hatting in the office—still I think every working girl should have one or two hats about which people can say, “Oh, my word, let me see you,” when she strolls in in it, a little squashy emergency beret for funerals and rain, and an all-embracing turban for hair disasters. I shouldn’t wear a hat in the office all day, even if you’re entitled. It looks as though you had more important things to do than play with your playmates there.
Most skirts and dresses are lined so that you don’t really need a slip, do you? I’m for leaving off everything possible in the interests of being less bulky, feeling more free and having more money to spend on what shows. If you’re going to wear a slip at all, it should be luscious—lace-loved, wild-animal patterned or whatever. (Some major department stores have a permanent counter of marked-down name-brand lingerie.) I can think of one special reason to wear a slip. When you take dictation or sit in a meeting, a bit of lace peeking out below a slender sheath skirt is fascinating—probably in better taste than a great expanse of leg-above-the-knee showing.
Girdles make me want to jump out the window, so I can’t tell you anything very constructive about them. I do know Olga girdles are good because I worked for that company for a year. They are sexy, simple little garments that other companies are always copying. Olga is a real live woman.
There should be all kinds of bras and all kinds of colors in your bra wardrobe—for plunge necks, scoop necks, shirts, sweaters. It isn’t any cheaper just to have one bra and wear it every day until it dies.
I believe nearly everybody pads. Even if you’re plentiful, you pad below to push everything up and out on occasion, and the occasion may be the office. Don’t feel guilty! You don’t have to be consistently padded or plain either! Keep them guessing.
Most people I know are hysterical about showers . . . they just can’t get enough of them and have to be dragged out. I would suggest a lot of girls ought to drag their bras into the shower with them. Tattle-tale-gray-looking bras look terrible when a strap falls down below a sleeve-line or a sleeveless dress armhole is so wide you can peek in and see the tattle-tale. Miracle fabrics tend not to look dead white after a while anyway, and that’s another reason to own colored bras and keep the white ones as clean as possible.
An extra pair of panties should be in your desk drawer along with the extra stockings.
For cocktails after work there’s no need to change. Your daytime wardrobe may be your most beautiful anyway if you love your job. If you have a date for dinner and don’t live too far away, it’s always nice to go home and get spruced up. A business associate may savor you in something Grecian for the night if he’s seen you in twill all day. If there isn’t time to go home and you know about the date in advance, bring clothes and change in the office. (I can’t count the times I’ve slid into an evening dress to go on to a movie premiere with David. The elevator man helped zip.) Bringing a cocktail dress is better than wearing it and being too gussied for the office all day or trying to make do in gingham at the Hilton.
If a big date blows up like Hurricane Cindy and there isn’t time to go home to change, you know perfectly well what you’re going to do. You’re going to go out on your lunch hour and buy something regrettable. I did it too, but I’d like to suggest three alternatives: 1. Go home on your lunch hour and pick up something you already own instead of shopping for something new. 2. Get your hair done and forget the dress. Fantastic hair does everything for you. 3. Borrow clothes from somebody who lives closer to the office than you do. (I’m for borrowing and lending because dresses rarely get worn out before they get boring.)
Now why would you want to insult the office party by going in your carbon-paper-smudged seersucker? Don’t you expect to have any fun?
The Christmas party certainly rates a special dress. If you don’t want to wear a party dress all day, bring one along and change. If nobody else is doing that, at least wear a dress that says, “Yes, I am taking this party seriously. I think it’s going to be a great party. I expect to enjoy myself.” Men appreciate your high spirits. One girl I know who is a mad twister sews her blouse to her petticoat the morning before she leaves home for an office party in the evening.
Sometimes secret weapons are called for. You know when these conditions exist. The following modes of dress have been known to move immovable objects.
1. As I pointed out, a blouse and skirt will usually not get you anywhere; however, there is one exception: A long-sleeved, severely tailored, button-down collar boy-shirt that hugs the bodice without any folds or pleats, worn with an equally figure-hugging skirt, makes you the “id” girl. It seems to work on the same principle of a girl wearing a man’s pajama tops. The contradiction of boy-tailoring on a girl’s curvy figure is arousing. Incidentally, you have to throw acid on a Brooks Brothers shirt to wear one out. They’re a fine investment in white, blue, yellow, pink, green and biege.
2. Wear beautifully fitting pants to the office on Saturday overtime assignments. An attractive man I know says he can resist any girl in a dress but goes absolutely to pieces when girls wear pants. Another one hired his secretary because he saw her flitting around the office in skinny bluejeans one Saturday. She turned out to be brilliant, but he didn’t know it at the time.
3. You remember the discussion of turning from lady-into-witch twice a year. Here is the witching-costume of one lovely Deborah Kerr type I know: fragile grey wool with wide bertha collar and a deep V neck. Nothing happens as long as she stands up. When she leans over, a man thinks he’s won the Irish Sweepstakes, died and gone to heaven. Have a “joy dress” in your wardrobe but remember, you can only get away with it if you’ve been a lady for about 150 days running.
4. If you’re small-bosomed, wear a pretty, lacy bra and leave your blouse unbuttoned one button below where it usually is.
5. A little pull-over blouse that just barely skims the top of the skirt in the same fabric—in other words, a two-piece dress with a short un-tucked-in top—can cause excitement. When a friend used to wear her black and white paisley one to work, the men were always trying to get her to reach up to top shelves for layouts and things. They couldn’t see a darn thing when she did except her midriff covered in a nylon slip, but this seemed to titillate them.
6. In summer, have a tan that doesn’t stop. One of the stunning-est career gals I know (a ladies’ club lecturer) tans in a bikini. Then she puts on a white pique dress that buttons all the way down the front with big black buttons. The dress is lined so she wears no slip—and no stockings. Somehow the tan that doesn’t stop, the “nothing on but this little dress” look, the thought that buttons unbutton and all that is devastating to men.
7. This style isn’t “in” right now, but consider sacrificing chic for sex just this once. A formfitting wool dress with wrist-length sleeves, plain high, round neckline, tapered-in hemline, hugging the figure everywhere but with no waist-seam or belt, makes you sexy as a seal (they are too sol). This dress would zip all the way down the back, from which it is a great angle for your co-workers to view you. (I hope you check all of your clothes for their back intrigue.) When you walk out of his office, you know very well his eyes won’t make contact with that report you left on his desk until you’re well out of sight.
8. Go choir-girl occasionally with a chalk-white collar and cuff set. It could be worn on the dress just described. Nothing pleases some men more than thoughts of deflowering innocence.
9. Select a fragrance as your very own and have it wafting from you at all times. You think you do, but I’ll bet you don’t! You put on a dab in the morning, another dab at lunchtime, and by 4:00 you figure it’s too near time to go home for another dab!
The fragrance-girls keep dabbing all day—it’s the only way. It’s also a good idea to start out in the morning with a big double dab of perfume on cotton, backed by more cotton to keep it from soaking through, then tucked in your bra.
Does the fragrance have to be expensive? Not necessarily. Catherine di Montezemolo, fashion director of Interpublic and a marchesa to boot, uses a fragrance called Pot Pourri—English and quite inexpensive. She sprays it around her office too. Another dream girl I know uses a men’s after-shave lotion.
10. This isn’t something to wear, but when a man is seated at his desk reading a letter, stand just behind him, very close, smelling wonderful, of course, and read along with Mitch—or Mack or Sam. Youll finish the letter, but there’s no guarantee he can keep his mind on it, especially if you nudge up to him kind of close.
11. If you have bushels of hair, I assume you keep it in a French twist or tucked away most of the time. In that case, let it down like Rapunzel some rainy morning. You can say you’re drying it out, but what you are actually doing is proving that unleashed hair has an unleashing effect on men.
I won’t put this down as a recommendation—I don’t want the responsibility! I’ll just tell you about a friend who unintentionally nearly finished off one of the executives in her office one day. It was a hot August Sunday afternoon, and several people were catching up on work in the building. Leslie was working alone in her own office, however. The air conditioning was off, and the place got hotter and hotter. Finally, Leslie said, she walked over to the door, locked it, took off her blouse and bra and started to work al fresco. She had been happily in this dishabille or no habille for some time when the door burst open, and a co-worker—male persuasion—burst in. (Any girl can make a mistake and take the night lock off when she thinks she’s putting it on.) Leslie’s friend backed out of the room, saying, “Whoops, terribly sorry,” but he has never been the same since. Leslie says he drops by her office four or five times a day and looks longingly in at her. The day after the “show down,” he told her, “It’s our little secret, Miss Woods. I’ll protect you.” But apparently what she needs protecting from most is her friend’s inner man.
In summing up clothes for the office, young artist Patty Olden-berg had some very sound advice in her New York Herald Tribune column. Patty said, “Don’t listen to the experts too closely. Wear the wrong thing here and the right thing there and the wrong thing at the right place and so on, but wear it if it pleases you and you’ll feel good and look good too.”
Now let’s talk about your sunny, funny face and how to have a scrumptuous office. No rest for the wicked ... or the sexy.