The legal profession may have embraced the dress-down revolution, but lawyers are still smitten with their suits, as Polly Botsford explains


The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Phillips, recently announced plans to end the wearing of wigs, wing collars and bands for judges and advocates involved in family and civil proceedings, and allow solicitor-advocates in criminal cases to wear the same as their barrister brethren. But is this part of a revolution in what lawyers wear and how they present themselves to the outside world? Does the dress-down revolution still have the legal world in its grip, or will the suit – pin-striped or otherwise – always hold sway?



While David Cameron is doing his best to introduce tie-less chic to the world, lawyers are apparently still smitten with their suits and, for men, their ties, as much as they ever were. Cliff Burgess, business development manager at shirtmaker TM Lewin, explains: ‘Suit sales are still very strong. Suits are now 20% of our sales, and that is new business over the last three or four years. Suit culture is very much here, particularly in the legal profession, accountancy and finance.’



And it is not because their firms are insisting on it. All the firms contacted by the Gazette have relatively flexible dress codes. Take Hammonds. ‘We do have a dress code but it’s not prescriptive,’ says a spokesperson for the national firm. ‘We merely ask that employees dress appropriately for a high-level professional organisation.’ For most, this is synonymous with a suit, collar and tie, as the spokesperson confirms: ‘Office dress is expected to be smart and appropriate – this tends to be interpreted by most lawyers as wearing a business suit.’



Nor is it a London thing. At regional firm Cobbetts, although there is no official dress code, ‘they are all wearing suits’, according to a spokeswoman. There does appear, however, to be an interesting connection between the type of office a firm has and the smartness of its inmates: national firm Bevan Brittan, whose dress code is ‘suits or equivalent smart business wear’ for men and, for women, ‘smart co-ordinates’, found that when its Bristol office was refurbished in 2007, smartness came back on to the agenda.



The culture is not that different in-house, as Richard Gaylord, legal counsel at Deutsche Bank, explains: ‘We all wear suits, although Friday tends to be less formal.’



However, it does depend on whose house you are in. At some companies, particularly in the media and telecommunications sector, ‘the norm for most staff is chinos and a shirt, with jeans making a guest appearance on Fridays’, says Julian Cohen, once legal counsel at Nortel and now a self-employed legal consultant with law firm Halebury Ventures. ‘And most of the in-house lawyers, but for a few, fitted in with that.’



There are some subtler rules for women. Nicola Rabson, a managing associate at Linklaters, says: ‘Most men wear suits, but the women are in smart tops, skirts or trousers, and heels. Of course, it depends a lot on departments, but jackets are often left for the domain of client meetings.’ So Linklaters’ female lawyers are living up to the City firm’s dress policy, which is ‘flexible’, according to a spokeswoman at the firm: ‘People have the choice of either wearing traditional business clothing or casual business clothing.’



But this ‘one suit fits all’ is not the case in two distinct areas: legal aid practices and government departments. Sam Fothergill, a solicitor at south London legal aid firm Mackintosh Duncan, was wearing jeans when the Gazette spoke to her. ‘Although wearing jeans is unusual, it is informal here,’ she says. She describes her male colleague, another lawyer, sitting next to her: ‘He’s wearing blue casual Tommy Hilfiger trousers, a lilac shirt and comfortable shoes.’ She adds: ‘I would say he looks like a fairly typical legal aid practitioner.’



In the Government Legal Service, dress code varies from one department to another. Susha Chandrasekhar, a lawyer at the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, and current chairwoman of the Association of Women Solicitors, says: ‘I probably only wear a suit once a week – when I have an external meeting. Otherwise, I do not feel the need to wear one, and most of my clients are not wearing suits either.’



But even government and legal aid lawyers, when they have to be smart, are putting on the suit. For men, this means also wearing a tie, and it is the tie which symbolises, for some anyway, the lunacy of formal attire. It was BBC broadcaster Jeremy Paxman who, in July of this year, famously described the tie as an ‘utterly useless part of the male wardrobe’ on his Newsnight blog.



In fact the tie, along with the collar, almost died a death when, in 2003, an employment tribunal found that an employer’s dress code policy was discriminatory when it asked men to wear a collar and tie whereas women only had ‘to dress appropriately and to a similar standard’ – the employer being the Department of Work and Pensions. The decision was, however, overturned on appeal. The collar and tie lived on.



The business suit was also challenged when smart-casual dress-down Fridays arrived in the UK over a decade ago from the US. Law firms thought it was all going to change and that smart casual would take on and take over. Amjad Hussain, a finance lawyer at Eversheds, explains how the trend affected him and his colleagues: ‘A more relaxed dress code of smart casual was introduced four or five years ago. Everyone thought it was fantastic and modern. I built up an “in-between wardrobe”, as I call it, somewhere between my suit and my casual wardrobe. I did that for a little while but I have reverted back to the suit. It is true I don’t always wear a tie, especially in summer when it is too hot and uncomfortable, but I think there has been a comeback of the suit.’



Mr Burgess agrees: ‘We did experience an element of dress-down creeping in but, after a while, feedback from a number of companies was that they needed to smarten up’. Dress-down Fridays still continue, and some firms offer dress-down Augusts, but lawyers are on the whole clinging on to their English ways and their English tailoring.



In fact, the suit is now getting a boost from the world of cinema. When the latest James Bond movie, ‘Casino Royale’, came out earlier this year and Daniel Craig was seen dashing around Venice, the Bahamas and Montenegro in a three-piece suit, retailers noticed renewed interest in the waistcoat addition. Pringle, for instance, put together a grey three-piece in their summer 2007 collection.



If that was not enough to bolster sales, suits have finally got fashion on their side – for women at least. Jess Cartner-Morley, fashion editor of The Guardian, explains to the Gazette: ‘For women, suits are more fashionable this coming season [autumn 2007] than they have been for years. Power dressing is back. After five years in which fashion was all about femininity and softness, suits and tailoring are making a comeback.’



So what makes the suit so, well, suitable? The suit is ubiquitous because it is ‘proper’, says Mr Burgess. ‘People prefer it as a uniform. It takes the guess work out of dressing, really. You can’t go wrong with a suit, but with dress-down, the variety can go wrong. And variety can be very extreme.’



Mr Hussain feels the same way: ‘It is easier. You don’t have to think in the morning – and it is always going to be appropriate. A client may pop in at the last minute.’ But, he adds, there is another dimension that is not only practical. ‘I do believe it affects your thinking. If you wear a suit, you feel mentally ready for the day.’



For Jeremy Paxman, it is far less rational. In his blog, he argued that the reason the tie, in particular, lives on is ‘the dead hand of convention. House of Commons rules say that men must not appear open-necked.’



But a lot depends on fickle factors ‘such as the weather’, says Evelyn Akintola, who trained with Transport for London and is now an assistant at Eversheds, ‘as well as how much money you have to spend’ – though Ms Akintola concedes: ‘Suits are not always more expensive than buying separates.’



Solicitors are uniquely well-placed to understand rules and regulations, so bearing in mind what the catwalks are telling us, when it comes to the suit, lawyers can now simply follow the rules of fashion.



Polly Botsford is a freelance journalist