"Girlfriends of the Court"

Corporate dressing

In Career, shoes, women on April 20, 2011 at 7:09 pm

Think of any of the women lawyers on the many American courtroom TV shows, from Ally McBeal to The Good Wife, and a common feature is what they wear. Neat little suits and great shoes are a staple. When I was working as a lawyer I too briefly aspired to that look.  It was pretty unsuccessful. Those cute little suits didn’t make it easy to manage files, court books and discovery boxes and I wore my heels out running up and down Queen Street to get to court. But it turns out even ‘the suit’ as imagined by legal drama can be controversial. You can see the furor in the US from a few years ago at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/us/23lawyers.html?_r=2&hp

Thank goodness there is also a blog dedicated to fashion for corporate women: http://corporette.com/ .

We know there are quite a few Shoe/Law and Fashion/Law blogs that our readers enjoy, please leave your favorite links for us to share below:

  1. This should be a sticky post!

    Here goes…

    how about

    Caveat Calcei’s Law and Shoes Blog http://lawandshoes.wordpress.com (my blog)

    oh and

    Siouxsie Law (Gothic Law and Style) http://siouxsielaw.com/

    Lucky Cinderella http://lucky-cinderella.blogspot.com/

    SoShoemi http://soshoemi.blogspot.com/

    Melissa and I and Soshoemi are working on @Neil_Watt to join us. He is one stylish (and very ethical) chap…

    • Thanks @Gabfran! Great suggestions, I noticed that @vaultlaw has a ‘friday fashion’ post (http://t.co/wVSiWwN) I am sure there are some other suggestions too. After all, we do have to keep ourselves nice, don’t we? And don’t forget the Judiciary have to frock up too: “King of Her Court

    • Thanks for the mention!

      The folks that comment on Corporette are amazing. Half the fun is seeing how the community will react to what Kat posts.

      As for other style blogs that haven’t been mentioned — “This Is Corp Goth” http://corpgoth.blogspot.com/

  2. Oh thanks for that one – very fun.

  3. For a completely different look see Maria O’Sullivan’s Vintage Suburbia at http://vintagesuburbia.blogspot.com/ . Another great Law/Fashion blog (well, more fashion than law…).

  4. When I read this post, the first thing I thought was that you didn’t mention the annoyance of STOCKINGS. I mean, if men had to wear stockings, they’d abolish them after about two weeks, I’m sure. The worst is when you put your finger through a new pair as soon as you go to put them on. The amount of money I went through on stockings was…shocking. So yeah, silly high heeled shoes, cute skirts and stockings aren’t all that practical.

    Actually I also have a wardrobe malfunction story from my time as a judge’s associate. On my third day on the job, I managed to step in dog poo as I was heading into work, and then get the poo on my handbag. So I hopped up the stairs with dirty shoe and bag held out, only to bump into my new boss/judge. “Can you deliver this parcel to the front desk for me?” he asked. “Um, no,” I said shortly. “Why not?” he said with surprise. “Because I’m covered in POO!” I said as I hopped off. I cleaned the poo off, but when I was racing back to pick up the parcel, I managed to split my skirt almost up to the waistband. We were in Practice Court that day, so I just had to lump it and hope that no one noticed, as I was wearing dark stockings and a dark green suit. I was terribly worried that my judge would think he had hired a lunatic (what a thing to do on day three of a new job!). When I mentioned it when I left his employ almost three years later, he didn’t even remember it, fortunately. I shouldn’t have reminded him…

    • Your point about stockings is spot on, why do we put up with them? Should we have a campaign to ‘liberate the legs’? And thank you for your tale of poo and fashion malfunction, I bet we could do a whole blog just on ‘professional bloopers'(now there’s an idea….)!

  5. @LegalEagle, If you are in Australia or the UK please ignore this comment.

    If you are in the USA when you say stockings do you mean these:

    http://www.uktights.com/menuSearch/stockings/price-2

    or these:

    http://www.uktights.com/page?xPage=tights.html

    I get into all sorts of bother on Twitter and on my blog with readers in North America who call tights “stockings”, stockings “thigh highs” and are completely confused by the term ‘hold ups’ in a hosiery sense.

  6. He he he
    There must be a PhD top[ic in that.

  7. I loathe stockings. When I started as a graduate solicitor I decided that if I never wore them then no one would notice when I stopped. So I didn’t buy any and went stocking-free the whole time. No one ever commented.

  8. […] is plenty of advice out there for women in business (including the law) on what to wear.  Wear skirts (there’s always been ‘social pressure to look sexually […]

  9. […] Corporate Dressing […]

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