Efficiency chic: it’s the new power dressing

How to look like you mean business

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Theresa May was spotted in that Vivienne Westwood trouser suit of hers again the other day. You know the one: grey, with the peculiar ruched collar. “Mmmm,” observed a friend. “Do you think she has reached the limits of her wardrobe? And does that mean that people are finally going to stop being interested in her clothes?”

Yes to the first question, pretty much. The next day she worked an Amanda Wakeley coat she had worn before, yet in a new colour, so it was the same but different. May is recycling — either literally or with a tweak here or there — because she is chiefly about things other than clothes. What she wears needs to remind us that she is too busy, too serious, to spend too much time on her attire. Yet she also needs to demonstrate that she is the kind of person to get things right, and that includes her sartorial choices. For her, showcasing a wardrobe that is small yet perfectly formed is politic, literally.

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As to that second question, of course May’s clothes are going to continue to garner comment to a degree that, say, David Cameron’s didn’t. Whether we like it or not, people are always going to talk about what a woman wears more than what a man wears. Yet May’s wardrobe isn’t that interesting and, even when it comes to her much-parsed shoe cupboard, people are already getting tired of talking cobblers. Our prime minister’s clothes will still be mentioned but increasingly, I predict, as a footnote, kitten-heeled or otherwise.

What May is wearing, you see, is efficiency chic: clothes that foreground rather than grandstand. Ultimately, she is the one who gets noticed, not her clothes. She isn’t out to make a fashion statement, rather a statement of intent: I am modern, I am together, I am a force to be reckoned with, I am a safe — but not too dull — pair of hands (or rather, with those self-consciously quirky shoes of hers, feet).

It is efficiency chic, more than anything else, that the modern working woman should set out to master, or rather, mistress. (Even our language hasn’t fully caught up with a world in which we may soon — please! — have a female president of the United States as well as a female UK prime minister.)

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