Dress for Success

By TAD BARTIMUS

Long before the phrase "dress for success" entered the lexicon, I sat on my parents' bed and watched my mother carefully prepare her persona. Be it a dance, business meeting or neighborhood picnic, she approached her public appearances like a general preparing for battle, always bringing to her mirror a clear sense of what to wear when.

There were rules about makeup, jewelry and accessories: no diamonds in the daytime, no white shoes after Labor Day, no black at weddings. Her generation married rigid mores with relentless peer pressure and produced a fashion yardstick with "impeccable taste" at one end and "no taste" at the other. There was Jackie and there was Marilyn, with Donna Reed in the middle.

But since Madonna wore her bra on the outside of her blouse all bets have been off. The fashion mavens of old have mostly gone the way of the shirtwaist; now stripes are paired with plaids, lace with leather.

Too often a womans worth was measured by the way she looked. No matter what she did, if she didnt do it in a girdle and stockings it didnt count. Taste arbiters talked to one another like World War II codebreakers; no one else could understand them but they understood each other perfectly.

This came back to me after I haphazardly threw clothes into a suitcase and wound up 3,000 miles from my closet, dressed in a pair of wrinkled too-tight jeans, an old blouse adorned with lint balls and a black-and-white houndstooth jacket made for a 5-foot, 10 woman but worn by one 6 inches shorter. These garments were worn by the woman I used to be.

But I am reinventing myself, transforming from the woman I was sure I was into a person full of possibilities and opportunities. With that growth comes doubts about how to get there and what to look like when I arrive. Stranded in a hotel room in perhaps the most inappropriate getup of my life, I turned to my traveling partner and said, "This looks OK, doesnt it?" Even I could hear the plea in my voice.

But my roommate, looking like a Ralph Lauren model ready to close the deal, was in no mood to give any quarter.

"Do you want the truth?" she asked. I knew I was going to get it no matter how I answered.

"Yes."

"It's hideous."

I knew that. But since Madonna wore her bra on the outside of her blouse all bets have been off. The fashion mavens of old have mostly gone the way of the shirtwaist; now stripes are paired with plaids, lace with leather. Manicurists will paint your fingernails purple or green to match your hair and shoes. Oprah Winfrey and her two female partners in the new Oxygen Media company posed for the cover of Forbes magazine as the Women in the Gray Flannel Suits. Sharon Stone wore a GAP T-shirt to the Oscars.

When you dump your old persona you have to figure out how to dress the new one. No longer corporate conservative, I'm not into power suits. Unconstructed linen that looks like I slept in it at the airport isn't my style, either. I'm in transition; so is my wardrobe.

Some days I miss my mother's fashion rules; it made picking clothes in the morning easy. But I don't miss the predictability of the woman who wore them.

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