Becca Aldridge
The Perfect Secretary
The aim of this collection is to tell the story of how secretaries are supposed to be perfect and the pressure that has come from this job being romanticized for females. Details will be explored through a secretary’s dress code of ‘a string of pearls’. Key office garments such as the pencil skirt, men’s shirt and oversized blazer have been reinvented to create new silhouettes focusing on emphasizing the décolletage whilst continuing to flatter the female body for an hour glass shape.
Whilst researching for my final collection I explored the secretarial dress code for females in the 50’s a key accessory was a pearl necklace. The irony of being expected to be able to afford a pearl necklace whilst doing so on an insulting wage intrigued me. This manifested into experimenting with pearl details throughout my collection and how they could represent this irony of secretarial dress codes. Handstitched pearl beads around the neckline and low back of look 3 became a result of the research.