Power Dressing: 4 tips for women business owners to own their style too

It’s not uncommon to see trendy office outfits doing the rounds, but as women in the workplace, it’s important to remember that if we are to make an impact, power dressing is, no doubt. the way to go. Power dressing used to be something that helped women be seen as equal to men, but now it’s more about expressing who you are and feeling confident along with it. If you are someone looking to master the style of power dressing, you’ve come to the right place! Here’s how you can incorporate power dressing into your life, especially if you are in charge of an organisation or you are looking to assert yourself within professional quarters.

Align Your Fashion With the Business Values 

We’re not talking about dress codes here, but more about the business’s core values, culture, and community that connects everyone in the organisation, like those wires connecting the computers in the servers. In one way, you’ve got to set your business mindset, but in another way, you’ve got to make sure that everybody knows what you are all about. 

You may be looking to spearhead different business initiatives, whether this is a mass texting service to keep your employees in check or an open-door policy that ensures you are conveying transparency at every turn, a lot of how you run your business can be reflected in the fashion choices you make. This is where power dressing has to step away from how it was once perceived. It used to be about bold suits and nothing more, but now you can take the concept of power dressing and imbue it with what you are attempting to achieve as a business owner.

Express Who You Are

A logical follow-on from conveying your business, if you are trying to put across a business personality that is more relaxed, this should be reflected in your fashion choices. It’s important for us to be at peace with who we are, and the biggest problem we can have in running an organisation is that we don’t necessarily feel that we should push for boldness. In other words, those bright contrasting colours that we tend to see on people who don’t give two hoots about what others think. 

We have to express who we are, and this is what will make us feel far more confident, but in the world of business, all eyes are on you, and this is where choosing your garments according to the occasion will make you appear more confident. Partly, this can be to do with comfort, but also about ensuring you choose the items that highlight your attributes. You may or may not have curves, you may want to hide certain inconsistencies, and all of the choices you make to either cover up or accentuate should serve one singular purpose: to make you feel more confident in your abilities. 

When we are confident in who we are, we will always do better work. We won’t be focusing so much on how we look or how we come across. Power dressing serves an amazing purpose to make you feel like you are unstoppable in yourself. It’s always about expressing who you are, even if you don’t feel like you are all-powerful that day. The right clothes are there to prop you up when you’re feeling anything but!

Be Aware of the Amount of Skin on Show

This is where things can get somewhat muddied. You may think that it’s important to assert yourself, and therefore you may opt for the low neckline. However, this can be a major distraction tactic and take away the attention of your colleagues, and in a client-facing scenario, this can take you a few runs down the pecking order. We have to remember that there are still people, especially men, who are firmly rooted in everything that is old-fashioned. 

Having to fight for our place at the table means that we can’t fall at the last hurdle by dressing in a manner that is deemed as blindsiding or inappropriate. Showing too much skin in an office environment can have a psychological impact on our colleagues, and we can be perceived to be less competent. Therefore, we’ve got to be very careful when it comes to how much skin we put on show. 

When we are in charge of our own organisation, we must remember that we are representing the organisation, but we’re also representing ourselves. We don’t want to have to work harder to be considered as equal because we made some form of fashion faux pas. This is why we’ve got to be particularly careful when it comes to what we dress in and deciding how much we actually put on display. There are certainly plenty of us who think that we should show whatever we want whenever the hell we want, but there is a major battle at play here, especially in the boardroom with, let’s say, people with smaller cranial capacity.

Maintenance and Consistency

Absolutely vital to the fundamentals of power dressing, it’s important to understand your style but also recognises the impact of sticking to it. There are a number of reasons why you should stick to your style, not just because you know it suits you perfectly, but it can also minimise decision fatigue. 

Barack Obama famously wore the same suit every day to minimise decision fatigue, and if you are dressing for power and are in charge of an organisation, it can be a lot of headwork thinking about what you should be wearing, how you should look, and doing this five, six, or even seven days a week! If you are dressing for power, make sure you have two or three staple looks and stick to them rigidly. This will also make sure that you feel more comfortable with your own style and will not feel the temptation to start switching up your look every so often to keep up with your contemporaries.

There are a number of ways to ensure that you can dress for power. Rather than it being something that was for the sake of equality, it’s now something that you can harness to be the best version of yourself, especially if you are in the driving seat.

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xoxo