Finding affordable professional womenswear has become increasingly difficult, argues Elle Lorenzoni, who believes the decline of accessible career clothing is creating new obstacles for women seeking to advance in professional life

What happens when women are still expected to look professional, but the clothing industry no longer provides affordable access to the clothes required to do so?

A recent shopping trip in London for a well-made, reasonably priced professional women’s suit revealed how elusive such attire has become. I sought tailored, substantial clothing suitable for a woman who needs to be taken seriously, not high-end couture or luxury labels.

Instead, most options encouraged women to appear carefree or sexy — cropped jackets, exposed waists, sheer fabrics, and oversized silhouettes dominated the look. While there is a place for such styles, professional settings require different choices.

Women’s professional access was hard-won, and respect was not automatically granted. Clothing became a vital tool for women to translate new rights into visible authority within spaces long considered male domains.

Women’s participation in paid employment rose dramatically during the second half of the 20^th century. In the United States, for example, women’s labour-force participation increased substantially throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Baby Boomer women entered universities, law firms, and offices in record numbers. They needed something to wear, and for a time, the market understood that need.

By the late 1970s and 1980s, department stores and high-street retailers began to recognise women as a professional market, offering coordinated suits and separates that signalled authority.

Style manuals and designers tried to turn that intuition into a system. John T. Molloy’s 1977 book, The Woman’s Dress for Success Book, and Donna Karan’s Seven Easy Pieces — designed to let women construct a working wardrobe from interchangeable garments — treated the working woman’s clothes as a problem worthy of being solved.

Liz Claiborne, celebrated by the Council of Fashion Designers of America for revolutionising how working women dressed, proved that affordable professional separates could be supplied at scale to women earning ordinary salaries.

My mother, from a poor background, graduated from law school when I was ten, with little inherited sense of professional style. 

She donned a skirt suit, hosiery, and sensible heels as her professional armour. By the time I was 16, I saw her become the second-highest-ranking person in her office, with the authority to hire and fire.

She told me about women who arrived for job interviews dressed as though they were going to an amusement park rather than seeking professional employment. She believed a few of them were qualified and wanted to give them another chance, but told them to return dressed professionally. They came back in business suits and received offers.

For decades, American chains such as Ann Taylor, The Limited, and Talbots, alongside department-store career departments, reliably dressed working women. They sold suits, blazers, trousers, skirts, dresses, and coordinated separates designed specifically for professional life. 

In Britain, brands like Hobbs, Jaeger, Principles, Jigsaw, Reiss, and formal lines at Marks & Spencer served a similar function. These were the places where women went to look like they belonged in professional spaces.

Who designs working women’s wardrobes today? Between the power suit and the crop top, the clothing industry stopped reliably dressing the ordinary professional woman.

Some of these brands remain, but the category itself has weakened. Affordable, dependable career wear is far less visible now.

Women have not stopped working, but much of the retail infrastructure that once treated them as distinct customers with professional needs has eroded.

The affordable women’s suit has become harder to find in tandem with the fashion market shifting its economics and priorities. Office dress codes have relaxed, hybrid work has reduced the number of days spent in the office, and retailers have, in response, shrank their workwear offerings. In autumn 2024, 28 per cent of working adults in Great Britain worked on a hybrid basis.

At the same time, the market has narrowed. Fast fashion prospers through speed and cheap construction; luxury through branding, exclusivity, and rising prices. Dana Thomas’s Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster documents how consolidation and globalisation transformed luxury fashion houses into corporate enterprises increasingly driven by branding, scale, and profit.

Between fast fashion and luxury, the dependable middle for moderately priced professional clothing has thinned out.

Fashion continues to borrow imagery from professional life while stripping it of much of its function. Cropped blazers, micro-skirts, exposed waists, and the ‘office siren’ aesthetic reference the workplace without necessarily providing clothing women can realistically wear on the job. In its womenswear trend reporting, Vogue Business described a movement from officewear toward ‘barely there’ fashion.

During the Baby Boomer era, criticism of colleagues who wore bows or other ornamental attire in professional settings was harsh. Anything coded as girlish or unserious could diminish authority.

Too often today, the clothing and media industries design clothing for women primarily to attract the male gaze rather than for the work. Clothing associated with sexual display can sit uneasily alongside expectations of professional authority.

Clothing communicates before its wearer speaks. A major review published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that workplace clothing affects both how employees are perceived and how they behave, with formality, provocativeness and fashionability emerging as recurring factors.

Professional women often learn the hard way that institutions care about an interviewee’s professional attire as much as they do about CVs. Research suggests that the margin for visual error can be especially narrow for women. In a UK study, published in Sex Roles, researchers made small changes to female office workers’ clothing, including skirt length and the number of blouse buttons left open. When the woman was presented as a senior manager, the slightly more revealing version received lower competence ratings. The same penalty did not appear when she was presented as a receptionist.

A later U.S study, published in The Journal of Social Psychology, similarly found that minor changes to a professional woman’s blouse affected perceptions of her intelligence, competence, power, and overall professionalism.

The suit never created equality, but it did, and still does, provide a practical means of navigating workplaces that remain unequal.

Relaxed dress codes haven’t lowered expectations. Men are often permitted a uniform while women are assigned a performance. They must appear polished yet effortless, feminine yet not frivolous, attractive yet not sexual, serious yet not severe.

None of this is to say that every woman must wear a suit. But women entering management, upper management, partnership, the judiciary and executive leadership must have the opportunity to dress in a way that allows them to be recognised as credible contenders for power.

Women should therefore be free to develop a professional style, but freedom requires options. It’s not freedom if the market removes authoritative clothing while workplaces still judge by appearance.

Women cannot assume their realities will be acknowledged automatically. History suggests the opposite. When women do not define what they require, industries define women by what is easiest to sell to them.

To dismiss this as ‘only fashion’ is to confuse personal comfort with solidarity. 

The disappearance of affordable professional clothing raises the cost of performing professionalism. Employers may never say that appearance was the issue but without access to professional dress, the burden falls on younger, lower-paid, or non-standard-sized women, who must spend more or risk judgment for failing to meet an increasingly difficult standard.

If clothing remains part of the test, access to appropriate clothing is part of access to opportunity.

Elle Lorenzoni is an entrepreneur whose work spans media, law, and communications. She holds a BA in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley, a Juris Doctor from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and an LL.M. from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her early career began at the William Morris Agency in Los Angeles, where she worked as a television literary assistant before going on to develop her own ventures, including Planning Pretty Picnics and The Spoken World. As Women, Work and Enterprise Correspondent for The European, she writes on female entrepreneurship, workplace culture, and leadership, with a focus on how power operates in professional environments and how it shapes women’s opportunities, decisions, and outcomes.

READ MORE: ‘What do corporations owe the people who trust them?‘. In the second of a two-part series, Elle Lorenzoni argues that the retreat from diversity and inclusion exposed a growing contradiction at the heart of modern corporate life. Companies increasingly claim the moral authority of public institutions while continuing to make decisions according to pragmatic rather than moral considerations.

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