Known less for its fashion coverage and more for its breathless reporting on wild water swimmers, The Guardian managed to score the style scoop of the century this week when it announced that a London-based legal firm had advised its employees to start dressing like Sam Smith’s back-up dancers. Vardags – which specialises in divorce and family law for high net-worth individuals – recommended that its 120 staffers swap out the Moss Bros suits and Reiss skirts for an “electric blue sequined jacket and gold leather trousers topped with a funky pink hairdo.”
“More like Annabel’s,” its new rules read, which is a member’s club beloved of Rita Ora and people who are too scared to walk around East London. All of this is to say: the indignity of being served divorce papers by someone wearing an Abba tribute costume is enough to drive anyone to join Fathers4Justice. It’s all well and good to loosen the tie, but perhaps we don’t need lawyers to look like they’re competing in a Rusical? Beyond its associations with authority and power, the suit is really about anonymity, and its facelessness can build a boundary around emotionally fraught situations.
But not these guys! You will now be delivered the most earth-shattering news (perhaps relating to child custody, adoption, surrogacy, wills and testaments) by style superstar Carson Kressley. “You can all be as wildly fabulous as you feel like, and express yourselves to the full,” as per Vardag’s instruction. The decision to shake up the Liverpool Street look came less than a month after the firm’s founder (bravely) took to LinkedIn to announce that she had got a noise piercing so that she could “start to live as the person I really am.” She also said that feels “like a badge of my Pathan ethnic and cultural heritage,” which is fair enough – but perhaps there’s a difference between traditional dress and dressing like you’re at the after-party of an am dram production of A Chorus Line.
