Clothes For Leadership Roles Then and Now

What Changed, What Didn’t, and Why We Still Need Strategy

We were told the rules changed. That things are more casual now. More flexible. More human.

However, no one really explained what replaced the old rules.

So we’re left guessing: Am I overdressed? Understated? Trying too hard—or not enough? And why does it feel like the consequences still exist, even if the standards don’t?

If dressing to even the playing field at work feels more confusing than it used to and somehow even more ruthless than before, you’re not wrong.

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

In a recent article, I wrote about how the beauty and confidence industries have sold women a comforting (but inaccurate) story: confidence is something you purchase, perform, or summon internally if you just try hard enough. The research tells a different story.

Confidence in professional settings is shaped by feedback, opportunity, visibility, and bias. It grows or erodes inside systems. And when those systems are flawed, no amount of positive thinking or hacks can fully compensate.

Understanding this does make a difference to our state of mind, think “Phew, it wasn’t just me!”) It also leaves an important question unanswered:

If confidence isn’t just a mindset—and the workplace still isn’t neutral—what does dressing for leadership roles (executive presence) actually look like now?

That’s what I want to explore here.

Executive presence: then

Fifteen or twenty years ago, executive presence was relatively legible. The rules weren’t always fair, but they were clearer.

Professional environments were more formal, ruled by strict dress codes. Expectations around polish, structure, and authority were easier to identify. Men wore suits. Women adapted (sometimes awkwardly) within a narrow range of acceptable options. There were tradeoffs, but there were also guardrails.

In that context, consultants like my mentor, Sandy Dumont, helped women use color, structure, and refinement as signals—not costumes or disguises, but cues of competence, credibility, and seriousness. The work wasn’t about empty vanity; it was about alignment: helping capable women be perceived accurately in environments that often underestimated them.

The core insight was simple and still true: people use shortcuts to help them assess others’ worth and our “image” was a way to maximize credibility.

What changed

Then came COVID and with it, a dramatic collapse of professional norms.

Formal dress disappeared almost overnight. Offices went remote. Casual became the default. “Just be yourself” replaced explicit expectations. Hierarchies flattened—at least visually. Many people assumed this informality would level the playing field. Well, it didn’t.

What actually happened was more subtle and complicated. Turns out, when standards loosen, ambiguity increases. When ambiguity increases, it creates even more space for bias.

In these casual environments, women aren’t evaluated less. They’re evaluated more ambiguously. Ambiguity is NOT neutral.

As you may remember from my recent articles, men often benefit from default assumptions of competence. A man can throw on a blazer, a decent shirt, and be read as “knowing what he’s doing.” The bar is low, and the signal is strong.

For women, the margin for error is still narrow.

Too polished, and you’re trying too hard.
Too casual, and you’re not taken seriously.​
Too feminine, too sexualized.​
Too neutral, too invisible.​
Too confident, too much.​
Not confident enough, not ready.​

The formal rules may be gone, but the consequences are not.

Casual didn’t erase power dynamics, it made them harder to see.

What didn’t change

Why? Because one, humans still have the same neurological wiring for shortcuts. And, two, they still have the same interpretations of what a leader looks like, what sloppy looks like, what someone looks like when they have their stuff together. None of that changed.

Despite cultural shifts, three things stayed stubbornly consistent:

• First impressions still matter: not because they’re fair, but because humans rely on cognitive shortcuts.

• Competence is still inferred, not just demonstrated, especially early on, and especially for women.

• Women are still judged on more dimensions than men: professional ability, likability, appearance, tone, warmth, restraint (often all at once).

What’s changed isn’t the existence of bias. It’s the lack of structure to buffer against it.

Which brings us back to this: we were told the rules changed, that things are looser now, that you can “just be yourself” because we have more equality now.

But because promotions, pay, and credibility are still on the line, it’s worth asking if this is another one of those “too good to be true” lies sold to us as a convenient "EASY BUTTON” that ends up being just a cheap prop.

Why strategy still matters (and why this isn’t about “trying harder”)

This is the part where many women hesitate. When we hear that we should dress for strategy and not “for me” and “for what makes me happy,” we get defensive. Indeed, in this context, strategy can sound like self-betrayal, societal expectation, some type of fakeness, or performance. Like the world makes women play a game they didn’t choose.

But hear me out: strategy isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about being realistic about the environment we’re in and making intentional choices rather than leaving interpretation entirely up to others.

Remember:

• People still fall back on stereotypes.

• When cues are inconsistent, bias fills the gaps.

Strategic self-presentation isn’t about chasing approval. It’s about reducing friction between who you are and how you’re perceived, using clothes and strategic grooming as intentional boosts of our own confidence while society slowly catches up with its lip service to equality.

At this point, we have two options: ignore this information or accept that strategic self-presentation is not weakness; it’s agency.

Where Light Loves Color fits

Light Loves Color isn’t about teaching women how to look impressive or about confidence as a vibe or a feeling.

It’s about realistic, strategic alignment:

• between competence and perception

• between internal competence and external cues

• between what’s in your control and what isn’t

Strategic self-presentation for business leadership roles today isn’t about dressing formally in a casual world. It’s about understanding effective signaling in an environment with fewer overt rules.

• Color still matters because it interacts with light to make your skin look better or worse.

• Structure still matters because structured pieces are still perceived as more authoritative and competent.​

• Understanding how to apply this in different contexts matters more than ever since ambiguity is greater than ever.

None of this works in isolation. That brings us to the next layer of the conversation: enclothed cognition. We’ll explore where enclothed cognition fits, where it doesn’t, and how real confidence is built at the intersection of skill, structure, and strategy.

That’s what’s coming next.

A note before we go further

If you’ve ever felt like you were doing “everything right” and still not being read accurately, it’s not your imagination.

Also, if you’ve ever worried that thinking strategically about how you show up meant you were being inauthentic or fake. I will show you that this work is about reclaiming authenticity with clarity, not betraying it.

You were told the rules changed, but you were never given the new ones. Optimizing your self-presentation approach removes obstacles and guesswork and leaves more bandwidth to do all the cool stuff you want to do.

More soon.

— Tatyana