Communicating Through Dress

Karen Thornton, George Washington University Law School, is publishing Parsing the Visual Rhetoric of Office Dress Codes: A Two-Step Process to Increase Inclusivity and Professionalism in Legal-Workplace Fashion in volume 12 of Legal Communication & Rhetoric (2015). Here is the abstract.

Legal employers expect attorneys in their offices to use the ethos of personal appearance to project an image of competence to clients. This expectation is largely unspoken, however, and polling and anecdotal evidence alike show that in today’s workplace, employers are frustrated with the level of professionalism demonstrated by new employees. The goal of this article is to encourage open conversations about workplace fashion as it relates to an attorney’s professional identity. It is in both the employer’s and employee’s interests to clarify employer expectations and empower new members of the legal profession to adopt a personal sense of style that projects competence, leadership, and professionalism, without subtracting out the self. Professional style and ethos, not conformity, should be the goal of office dress codes. This article is written from the perspective of a legal writing professor and advocates an approach to building a positive office culture by training new lawyers to parse the message of unwritten dress codes and participate in drafting inclusive office policies that accommodate disparate cultural, racial, and gender experiences. By making the unconscious conscious through open communication about employer goals and employees’ professional identities, biases can be overcome and new attorneys prepared for a profession where choice of dress projects an instantaneous message about an individual’s business judgment.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.