Laura Craik on dressing for the office and Vetements' T-shirt faux pas

The first time I met one former boss, I was wearing pink trousers, a yellow jumper and white lace-up brogues. I looked like a kids’ TV presenter. Which is a shame, because I was a fashion editor. The second time I met him, I was wearing pool slides. I never did get the hang of dressing for the office. I know how they’d like me to look — Maggie Gyllenhaal in Secretary mixed with Melanie Griffith in Working Girl minus the perm — but it’s just not me. Faced with constructing a coordinated office look or eating an extra slice of toast, I choose toast.

According to a new study, one in four women have been cautioned about their appearance in the office. ‘Why aren’t you at home batch-cooking chicken for your husband while dressed in a sexy maid’s outfit?’ was the main complaint. I’m kidding. The main complaint was make-up. Which is less sexist, but only just.

When it comes to make-up, women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Sometimes, it feels like make-up exists purely to fuel studies about make-up, designed to undermine us. Another study claims that female undergraduates who wear make-up perform 20 per cent better in exams. Boosting your attractiveness makes you better at handling stress, it seems. No word on how you handle the stress of being reprimanded for wearing it.

When Nicola Thorp made headlines last summer after being sent home from her receptionist job for refusing to wear high heels, the government pledged to publish new dress-code guidelines. Given that the other complaints against women listed in this study include slogan T-shirts and ‘outfit flamboyance’, these can’t come soon enough. Outfit flamboyance? Does that mean a unicorn onesie, or a yellow shoe? And unless your T-shirt says “I Hate My F*cking Job”, what’s the problem? Here’s a guideline: quit nitpicking over women’s appearance and let them get on with their jobs.

Feeling Shirty

Has Vetements reached Peak Irony? ‘Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money,’ runs the copy on a new Demna Gvasalia-designed T-shirt, credited as being a Cree First Nation proverb. Instagram wasn’t slow to call it out. ‘Cultural appropriation for profit,’ said one user, and indeed, there can surely be no finer example of eating money than spending £300 on a T-shirt. When some took issue with Dior’s ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ T-shirt costing £490 (pointing out that most women were still paid too little to afford it), Dior donated a percentage of its sales to Rihanna’s non-profit organisation, The Clara Lionel Foundation. The Vetements T-shirt isn’t for sale yet: maybe Demna will follow suit, and give back to the estimated 200,000 Cree living in Canada. Or maybe he won’t.

Trouble Brewing

Few things are more embarrassing than going to the bar and asking for a Slow, Comfortable Screw. In the Nineties, rare was the cocktail that didn’t have an asshat name, which is partly why I stuck to drinking beer. ‘Pint, please’ is nicely devoid of innuendo. In these brave new days of gender neutrality, you’d think we’d have evolved past the idea of Ladydrinks and Mandrinks, but no: here comes Aurosa, with its ‘unique, unmistakeably strong taste adapted to the elegance of women’ (nope, me neither), in a bleurgh bottle that makes it look like cheap champagne. In fact, it’s beer, though why beer needs to be feminised (or cost £9 for 330ml), I do not know. This summer, let men drink cocktails with little umbrellas on top and let women drink vast tankards of ale. FFS, let everyone drink what they want to drink.