The late, great Helen Gurley Brown -- longtime editor of Cosmo magazine and author of multiple feminist books -- once said that she believed you should "dress pretty" for the office.
Notice she didn't say sexy. A lot of people seem unable to distinguish the two things.
A challenge women have is that in order to do business and be successful in your career, you need to be attractive enough and pleasant enough to be around for your presence to be socially acceptable, but if you are too attractive everyone wants to date you or marry you, not pay you for your work.
In my last post, I said:
So I've wondered how women dress and comport themselves in cultures where women have historically had real power and I've wondered how you translate male professional stuff into some kind of feminine option.
My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family that sold the title when they fell on hard times. My mother has extremely conservative ideas about how to dress.
At some point, I realized that the "rules" and expectations I was raised with closely mirror what articles say about expectations for the British royal family: No cleavage, no bra straps showing, no excessively short skirts, no excess skin showing and NO EXCUSES.
Princess Diana was world famous for being a gorgeous fashion plate while abiding by those rules. One article pointed out that a purpose of her small clutch handbags was to cover her cleavage or whatever when getting in and out of vehicles or otherwise in situations where she might -- oopsie! -- be momentarily in violation of the expectation that such things not show.
Because NO EXCUSES.
I will note that Great Britain has had powerful Queens who were not merely the little wifey of the King and, in fact, had a powerful Queen until very recently when Queen Elizabeth died and her son Charles took the throne.
England and America have been described as "Two countries separated by a common language" and the US started as thirteen British colonies. If you are working in America, the British royal dress code is probably the best place to look for ideas to be attractive enough for the world to want to hire you without being too sexy.
It's generally in line with the business casual or business formal dress codes of some US corporations, such as Aflac where I worked for five years.
Having worked at a corporation for five years, I'm painfully aware that most women's fashions in US stores do NOT pass these standards. Too much cleavage, fabric is too thin to give good coverage, etc.
Do it anyway if you want the world to take you seriously. Vote with your wallet and hopefully the fashion industry will start paying attention to what career women want and stop giving us two options:
1. The rack full of street walker clothes.
2. The Ugly Rack for women with no taste and no self esteem because they aren't a size two and/or would like their self esteem to come from somewhere other than "I'm sexy!"