Businesswomen Wear Prada

At Northwestern, there is no shortage of intelligent, successful, and extremely professional women with their eyes on the world’s top internships and job opportunities. However, as I have come to learn, the problem here is not always finding a job, but rather, finding what to wear to one. Older generations will try to convince you that when it comes to professional clothes, what you want to wear doesn’t matter as much as what your employers want you to wear. While I completely believe that dressing to impress is a necessity, I refuse to wear my mother’s 30-year-old pair of black dress pants and square-toed patent leather flats anywhere besides my piano recital when I was 12. In an age where powerful women dominate so many professional circles, why do we still feel the need to dress according to what old men decided was best for us long before our generation’s women ever even entered the workforce? Thus begins the never ending problem for millennial businesswomen of how to incorporate personal style into the bland workplace attire which our parents and their generation enforces.

Don’t let “casual Fridays” confuse you. For young college students just stepping foot into the world of office cubicles and coffee runs, one thing is certain; the workplace environment does not cater to the newly-twenty-year-old, but rather the upper management employees almost exclusively made up by people twice our age. Although good first impressions in the workplace are vital, at what point do we stop dressing like the middle-aged CEOs we work for and start dressing like ourselves— but still in a somewhat “professional” way, however you choose to define that. I asked two Northwestern women about their experiences balancing the seesaw of professionalism and fashion.

For Miriam Khan, a sophomore in the School of Communication, “it can be hard to find the right work attire as an intern” given that “millennials are used to a more laid back style and work environments require more formal and sometimes not-so-cute attire.” According to Miriam, minimizing the gap between the two standards for professional attire all comes down to “finding the pieces that work for you”—as daunting a task as that may seem. Last year, Miriam worked at Nextera Energy, Inc. in the external affairs department where the dress code was labeled business casual—meaning, for women, uncomfortable business pants, conservative blouses, and run-of-the-mill pencil skirts (see below for example).

By the way, to find this image, I googled “women’s business casual” so I’m assuming this a pretty universally accepted standard. However, for the young and stylish Miriam Khan, this would not do. On her hunt for professional but sensational apparel, Miriam headed straight for J.Crew and Banana Republic (the Ann Taylor of our generation) where she found “pretty patterned blouses,” “pastel blue skirts,” and a mix of fashionable and appropriate internship clothes—which put together made a fabulous first day on the job outfit. Go Miriam!

Next I talked to Bryn Weiner, also a sophomore in the School of Communication, who is planning to work at Pfizer in New York this summer. Pfizer’s dress code is slightly more formal than Nextera’s, and can best be described as “business professional”— i.e. blazers, pant suits, heels. Bryn started her journey for affordable, fashionable, and comfortable work outfits at Garage and the Woodbury Common Outlets where cute button-up shirts and shawls fit the business professional code but didn’t make her feel older than her age. According to Bryn, the keys to finding that perfect balance at work are a couple accessories, like layered necklaces, to show your style without compromising the environment of the work place — and I agree.

Despite the palpable divide between what millennials find appropriate and what their employers do, young and driven women like Miriam and Bryn are setting the new standards for professional and self-expressive couture. Every year, more and more brilliant young women will fight the patriarchal dress codes which have dominated business circles for one generation too long — one layered necklace at a time. By having the courage and professionalism to represent ourselves as who we are even in fields where the average age almost doubles our own, this next generation of powerful women can shatter the glass square-toed slipper.