My bosses are quite lenient about whether women wear dresses or trousers. It’s seen as a matter of choice about whether women want to wear flats or heels. Usually my bosses aren’t bothered if my colleagues wear a black dress instead of a white blouse, although some managers have pointed out if we don’t look consistent in our appearance (where the colour scheme comes in), guests won’t know we are all staff.

One notable thing about where I work is that most people who come as guests are in their own work situation or environment (in conferences etc) and so I get to see what is their work attire. One universal is that women are expected to wear high heels, and invariably if I’m doing cloakroom duty, they are in a lot of pain and have a pair of flats to go home. I’m getting the impression that they feel there is a pressure on them to wear high heeled shoes, or to be seen wearing them. Working in corporate events does make me see the highly gendered nature of our clothing. The thing that I find insufferable about it is how tacit it is. At least with somewhere like UBS they are explicit about the gendered rules. I find something comforting in being explicit about appearance against talking about people’s appearances behind their back etc.

I think my office falls into a third possible category: very laid-back clothing-wise, but the women who are doing best and getting ahead tend to also wear elaborately put together ‘concept outfits’ (e.g. ‘Vivienne Westwood cowgirl’), complete with plentiful heels, makeup and accessories. There’s an element of objective enjoyment of fashion here (we’re a ‘creative bunch’ and we want to show that we understand the creative sector), but I also occasionally wonder if there’s an element of coercian too – if I have an external meeting, I always make sure I’m wearing heels or a skirt or something quite pointedly ‘fashion’, whereas on fridays or days when I’m just bumming around the office doing admin I’ll often just wear jeans and a shirt, or something else that’s quite gender-neutral because it’s easy and comfortable. The guys in the office (although there aren’t that many of them, interestingly) can essentially do this every day with little variation in how smart they look – I once went to a meeting in Leicester with plimpsoles for the journey and massive heels whipped on only when I was just around the corner.

It all heads back to tribal marking doesn’t it?

I used to enjoy so called ‘dress down friday’ as I took that to mean ‘goth up friday’ and used to enjoy seeing just how far I could push it without taking it too far – pinstripe is a marvellous thing and can be subverted so well :-)