A Message from Career Services: Ladies, Please Learn How to Dress Yourselves

We thought that we had gotten the point across on this in October: ladies, if you dress like hookers, the only jobs you'll get will be underneath a partner's desk. But apparently that message fell on deaf ears, because one law school's Career & Professional Development Office had to co-sponsor an event with the school's Women Law Students Association on how to properly dress for an interview....

We’ve been down this road before, but society still seems to think that female lawyers and law students don’t know the basics of fashion. Maybe it’s true, especially given the number of events on this topic that repeat the same information ad infinitum. We’ve seen seminars on how to have fashion sense for the workplace, followed by lessons on fashion dos and don’ts. When will the madness end?

We thought that we had gotten the point across on this in October: ladies, if you dress like hookers, the only jobs you’ll get will be underneath a partner’s desk.

But apparently that message fell on deaf ears, because one law school’s Career & Professional Development Office had to co-sponsor an event with the school’s Women Law Students Association on how to properly dress for an interview….

Over the weekend, we received an email from a tipster bemoaning her law school’s recent foray into the fashion universe:

I’m a 1L at a T14 law school (U.S. News list, not Thomas Cooley’s list) and was embarrassed to attend an event put on by the women’s association at this school about interviewing for the summer and for next years OCIs. Some of the tips in the attached document are standard/helpful. However, others are just ridiculous. I don’t want to give said school any bad press (and redacted the info on the pdf), but I really thought this was way over the top as far as treating us like children who are going to embarrass them in front of their important, rich friends.

Take special note of the advisements about which deodorant to buy and how to wash our lingerie and what to do about razor burn?! Really? This was detailed at an hour long event and then forwarded to the entire listserv.

With an introduction like this, we couldn’t help ourselves from trying to find out which law school had put on this event. So, which school was the culprit? Some simple internet searching revealed it was Duke Law School. Now, we knew that law students at the school were douchey, but apparently they’re fashion-impaired, too.

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Duke Law’s event, What Not to Wear: Interview Edition, was supposed to “give [students] tips and rules for dressing for [their] summer job and interviews.” While some of the information was spot on, the rest was just laughable.

Let’s see what kind of advice the Duke Career & Professional Development Office and Women Law Students Association had to dole out….

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