The other day someone told me I didn’t look professional.
Which is fine. There has never been a point in my life where I wanted to look professional. There have been times where I needed to look professional, but I have literally never wanted to look professional. What I actually want is to look cute and tough. Like, I want people to see me from a distance and think, “she looks like summertime. You can smell the salt water on her skin.” Then, when you get a little closer you think, “oh, that girl could kick my ass.” There is no professional outfit that communicates that.
But, who cares, I live alone in the woods and run a summer camp. I need to look professional 0% of the time.
And the thing was, they said it like it was an insult. Like they thought I had just missed it. As if, when I got up that morning and put on my jeans and Mulan t-shirt, that is strategically cut to reveal my “abs,” I thought, “yep, I look like I should be running a fortune 500 company.” Add a blazer and I am ready for lunch with Gates, Schultz, and the Amazon dude. No. I put on that outfit and thought, “I was cool once.”
Just so we’re clear, I was never cool. That was someone else.
I also don’t know why this person felt the need to tell me that, like I was in a board meeting talking about the future of the nonprofit that I act as director of. It certainly was not as if someone had just asked me if any of my shirts still have collars on them. All of that happened the day before.
Okay, here’s the thing. I know that I do not dress or look professional ever. My skirts are too short, I like t-shirts and tank tops with funny things on them, and anything with a crew neck makes me feel like I’m being strangled. I also know that the way we dress is important. It communicates a little bit about who we are and where we are. It is hard to be in a professional situation and be taken seriously if you do not look the part.
That is part of why women struggle to be taken seriously in highly professional settings. Women are often told that the way we dress says something about our personality and that we are also always supposed to be cute. Cute is the rent we pay to live in the world. Men don’t have that issue. Men’s fashion has been the uniform for professionalism for decades. It’s easy, you put on a suit and you’re ready. Suit, tie, button down shirt, and you’re in the clear.
However, it does not matter for me. I have, in the past not so much now, tried very hard to conform to the professional uniform but even then when I walk into a board room and still look like a child because I’m 5’2” and look like a perky cheerleader (I do own something like 45 scrunchies and only know how to do my hair in a ponytail so some of that is on me.). When I dress professionally, I look like a child pretending to be an adult. Maybe I am. I do prefer to tell people that I’m a grown up, which is not a very adult thing to say.
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