Women should wear trousers and a jacket over a jacket, a panel of experts has said, in an effort to promote a more casual approach to dressing in public.
In a series of recent pieces, some in the media have described wearing trousers as being too casual.
“A pair of trousers and your trousers, the shirt and your shirt, are not the same thing,” said Richard Lloyd, director of fashion consultancy Lulu, in the latest piece.
“[They are] not going to make you feel good in public and they’re not going not to make your trousers feel good.”
Lloyd suggested that men and women need to look at how they are dressed in public to ensure they are not going “back to the dark days of the early 1900s”.
“It’s not just about the clothes,” he said.
The panel of fashion experts, who included fashion designer and fashion icon Donna Karan, also said that a jacket is better than trousers for a “casual approach” to dressing.
They said that when it comes to a dress, men and a woman should wear something “that feels modern, comfortable and fashionable” rather than something “totally formal”.
In their latest advice, Lloyd added: “The way we wear our clothes has to reflect who we are as men and as women.
It’s about making the right choices about what we wear and what we do when we are not wearing them.”
The advice came as the country’s most senior female police officer, Dame Louise Casey, also called for women to wear a “men’s jacket”.
“We need to make sure that men have a choice,” Casey said.
“There is nothing wrong with a men’s jacket, but it is a choice.
It is something that can be made.”
“You need to dress like you do when you are out in public, whether that’s on a Sunday morning or a Monday morning,” she added.
Casey also called on men and boys to be more active in the community and to learn about the roles they can play.
“It is not just what we put on our bodies, but the way we look at our bodies that is important,” she said.
Casey said that the need to wear men’s clothes was “a question of how you dress”.””
If you don’t know where to put your clothes on or you don, I mean, you have got to be able to look around you and think about where you are at any given time.”
Casey said that the need to wear men’s clothes was “a question of how you dress”.
“I think we have to think of men and men’s bodies in terms of what they do for us,” she told the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire programme.
“You don’t just put them on when you go to the cinema and you go out and have a bit of fun, you put them there because they do a lot of good things for us.”
Earlier this month, Dame Mary-Ann Evans, the patron saint of women’s fashion, said the “fashion industry is not about being feminine, it is about being the best”.
“It does not matter how you look, or what you wear, or how you treat women, or who you are, if you are an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur who works hard and does good for people and makes a difference, then women should wear a suit or a skirt,” she was quoted as saying.
However, there has been growing concern over the rise of women in the fashion industry, with several leading brands now saying that it was becoming too male-dominated.
“I feel that the industry is very much dominated by men, and that women are being pushed into certain roles,” said Anna Fauci, fashion and beauty editor at the Telegraph.
Fauci added: “[I]t’s about men being the bread winners, and women being the cooks, and not really getting a good say in the way that they do their business.
It’s about having a little bit of control.”
