After the City: The joy of not wearing a skirt

Oh no! Horror of all horrors - one was red, the other blue.

I refer to my shoes. Getting up from my desk one morning to make a coffee, I happened to glance at my feet and thus began one of my more difficult days.

Quite how I had got that far before noticing the state of my shoes must have had something to do with the state of my head at that miserable time of the morning.

How I had achieved this mismatched fashion statement was easier to explain. Firstly, I always dressed in the dark so as not to disturb my still-slumbering husband. Secondly, not being one to fuss about the uniform of City life, I tended to buy all clothes and shoes in multiples of identical items, with colour being the only variant.

The uniform of my youth had always been completely casual. From a school with no uniform, through university and beyond, my wardrobe consisted of a few pairs of jeans, t-shirts and canvas shoes in the summer, sweat shirts and boots in the winter.

I owned no skirts and from earliest childhood rebelled at the mere mention of trying one out.

(I was at school with one of the two female presenters of a certain TV programme which addresses the sartorial faux pas of others - she would turn up in a succession of glamorous and expensive outfits which she claimed she acquired on shoplifting bonanzas at the weekends - I suspect this was only attention-seeking and Daddy's chequebook was well flexed, but that is another story!)

When, as an impoverished ex-student, I was forced to put together a City wardrobe, I developed principles that were to stay with me for most of my career.

Keep it cheap, keep it simple and avoid designer names at all costs; and if you find something that works, be it skirt, jacket or shoes, buy three in different colours and stagger their use.

My first employer was excessively formal. A woman's suit was a suit - a co-ordinated skirt and jacket would draw long and disapproving looks from members of the board if one was unlucky enough to share a lift with one.

Shirts were copied from the men preferably, with double cuffs and buttoned right up.

The men - though strangely not the women - were expected to wear their jackets when entering the 'public spaces' of the building - lifts, landings, corridors and - because of the necessity of using at least one of the above to get there - toilets (a matter for the mind slightly boggling!).

Another firm of a similar formality in those early days forbade its male staff from rolling up their sleeves when jacketless. As for short-sleeved shirts, well they would be a sackable offence.

A colleague from the Tokyo office (he was English and therefore should have known better, but he had lived abroad for far too long) once appeared in London one summer day in a pale blue and white sear sucker suit.

He was not invited back and was shortly afterward banished to the accounts division in Osaka.

One of my female friends and colleagues - there were so few of us we were all friends - was quite the opposite of me. She would go to town on her outfits and would always, when going out to visit clients, don hat and gloves.

Her collection of hats ran into numbers that surpassed my entire wardrobe. She was always - still is in fact - glamorous and elegant and I never quite knew how she managed it.

By the early nineties, I was working for the Swiss and became enlightened by my frequent trips to Zurich where all self-respecting local bankers - male - would troop up and down the Bahnhofstrasse with purple trousers, plaid jackets, mustard coloured shirts and ties that were downright peculiar.

Tentatively I branched out into separates and quickly discovered that this was a great way to pare down my loathed working uniform still further. Three identical skirts in different colours, three jackets - each matching at least two of the skirts - plus two or three pairs of shoes, identical but for the colour of course, matching a selection of the above and I was fixed for a wide range of combinations.

By then too, the collared shirts had been abandoned in favour of t-shirts and life was starting to get more 'unbuttoned'. Then came the first big breakthrough - trousers!

Oh joy, comfort was staring me in the face for the first time in City life. Tentatively, I added a pair to my wardrobe (but not before at least half a dozen other girls had taken the plunge first) and then another and then eventually I ceased replacing the skirts altogether.

I was still with the Swiss when they introduced dress down Fridays. This created a whole new set of rules, though the men had it far more complicated.

Denim was verboten, as were shirts with no collars and sockless feet. The girls at least did not have the last two to worry about but some of the secretarial staff would have long and heated discussions about just how much of their flesh the codes of dress down would allow to be displayed.

These Fridays began by being in the summer only and then spread to the rest of the year. By the time of my last employment, Friday had become the whole week and my formal wardrobe was down to a single pair of trousers and two jackets.

We still had a curious set of rules to do with decorum in front of clients - in theory, if you met a client you had to be dressed up.

However, if I knew I was having lunch with a client who was certain to be dressed down, there was no way I was going to get dressed up. Often we would conspire to match ahead of time.

The bank had a suite of in-house meeting and dining rooms on a single floor of the building. Employees of the bank were not allowed to set foot on this floor unless properly attired.

However no such formality applied to the clients, who could do exactly as they pleased and one would often look rather silly hosting a lunch, 'suited and booted' for a dozen or so clients, most of whom turned up in jeans.

One - a male hedge fund manager - once arrived in shorts, a t-shirt and sandals, going a little too far perhaps!

I can't really remember how I got through the rest of that day of the mismatched shoes without drawing attention to my feet, though I believe I must have forked out on a taxi to get home in order to avoid the ignominy of my shoes being noticed on the tube.

It remains a painful, if somewhat blanked out, memory that if nothing else led to a more careful ordering of my cupboard.

Now that I no longer work in the City, I have reverted to the casual style of my youth - though given the expansion of my waistline as my thirties gave way to my forties, jeans are no longer the item of choice.

For me it is utter bliss not to have to think about the work day uniform. As I gather the formality pendulum in the City is swinging back towards regular suiting up, I find yet another reason for no turning back.

candiapeterson@hotmail.com