TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/032789/03278900.045

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.3 KB | 146 lines

                                                                                AMERICAN SCENE, Page 16

Atlanta, Georgia


Image Wilting?  Help Is at Hand A consultant raids closets to
help the humdrum look upscale

By Richard Conniff


    Out there in this great land of ours, the beige-clad ranks
of the image-deprived stand in huddled multitudes. They are
people who do not realize their hair is too long or their pants
are too short, professional people who walk around dressed
unwittingly like flight attendants or supermarket managers. Who
will tell them their professional image needs help? And how does
one begin? Over lunch maybe, with a lame joke? "Hey, I bet this
salad knows a thing or two about dressing. Ha! But seriously .
. ."  It is like telling them they have halitosis.

    This is why God made image consultants. (Did you think he
was going to give us the image and just let it go at that? O ye
of little faith!)

    On a weekday afternoon in a fashionable men's shop in
Atlanta, Lynne Henderson stands in front of the three-sided
mirror next to her client, a landscape architect named Tom,
leading him through a drastic image upgrade. Back in December
a traveling image consultant gave a presentation in Atlanta, and
Tom showed up with two business suits for a critique. "He told
me to burn everything," says Tom. "But not in an offensive way."
He has hired Henderson, whose London Image Institute is based
in nearby Alpharetta, to help him rise out of the ashes.

    In the mirror, Tom's eyes flick nervously toward Henderson,
seeking rescue. She has plucked him out of the familiar styles
he settled on back when a pair of Weejuns cost $20, and he is
lost among the choices. The first sweater he bought with
Henderson's help struck him as so ugly, so splotched with color,
that he left it hanging in his room for a week. But people loved
it, people who'd never looked at him twice, except in dismay.
So he is meekly agreeable when Henderson puts him in a midnight
blue Giorgio Armani suit with tone-on-tone striping. "To me,
that's a front-of-the-room look," she declares.

    Henderson is an attractive, birdlike woman, small-boned,
with coppery hair tufted up at the sides. She has been helping
people look better since that dim era (the 1970s) when only
politicians and models had images to worry about. Henderson
started out in England, where she "did her postgraduate work in
movement and body language" and worked in modeling. When she
married an Atlanta physician and came to this country, she
discovered the thriving all-American business of image
consulting for ordinary people. It struck Henderson that all the
signals about class, education and authority conveyed by speech
in England were matters of image and dress in the U.S., and that
her fashion training qualified her to set up shop as a
newfangled Professor Higgins. Since then, she says, "I've taken
more people out of beige than they've had hot meals."

    Henderson does some of her best work in clients' homes,
where she can sift through the subject's existing wardrobe.
"O.K., Lynne, give me some pizazz," a new client demands, as she
leads Henderson into her bedroom and prepares to undergo the
ordeal known as "closet analysis." She is a 29-year-old
accountant and regards herself as too businesslike. Also too
wide in the hips. Henderson sizes her up, then eyes the closet
sideways and purses her lips to suggest that she is not
displeased: "I see some colors that work together. We've got
some continuity going here." Then the clothes come out in waves
onto the bed, mixed and matched in combinations that have never
occurred to the accountant -- the red blouse with the gray suit,
the magenta cardigan with the dark paisley skirt.

    "Oh, I love color! I love red!" the accountant enthuses.
Her specialty is estate work, she says. "I meet with all these
old men in their blue suits, and I love to shock them."

    The session has its peculiar rituals. Sitting on the bed,
the women cross their upturned wrists like musketeers' swords
to discuss each other's skin tones in terms of the seasons.
(The question "Have you been seasonalized?" is the image
consultant's equivalent of "What's your sign?") The sisterly
aura here helps Henderson share some awful truths. When the
accountant worries that black stockings may be too sexy for
work, her consultant confides, "No matter how
woman-without-virtue you try to look, you won't have that
problem. You're squeaky clean. I'm going to try to take you out
of your preppiness." "Oh, please do," the accountant sighs.

    Henderson says that if she does not speak plainly, her
clients make no progress. Her next client, for instance, is a
corporate trainer who was recently passed over for promotion
because of "ineffective appearance." She is 50 pounds
overweight, dresses frumpily and wears her hair like Farrah
Fawcett in Charlie's Angels. The company has generously offered
to pay for image therapy at $50 an hour.

    At the moment Henderson is teaching her how to walk. A few
trips back and forth across Henderson's mirror-lined studio
demonstrate that the client's forward-slouching stride is
costing her self-confidence and that her left foot has a way of
wandering off by itself.

    "O.K. Now, put your heels on the line, one in front of the
other," Henderson says, indicating a tape mark on the floor.
"Tuck your seat in, lift up your ribs, pull up on that thigh so
much that it feels like a real pedestal. What's happening?"

    "I'm losing my balance."

    "All right, now. Ready to make a step. Roll it through,
straighten, place down." The client wobbles through one lap and
does a Mae West sashay through another. But then, by Jove, she
gets it.

    "Does that feel weird?" Henderson asks, and answers herself
in mock Cockney: " 'Oo cares 'ow weird it feels! It looks
infinitely neater. I want you to practice this even when you're
in Winn-Dixie, please, pushing the cart along. O.K. Ready for
this? While you're walking, I want you to smile. Heaps better!"
Henderson will send the client's supervisor a status report and
a schedule of goals: a new hairstyle by next Saturday, three new
garments that work together by March 31, a diet and exercise
regimen to shed five pounds a month through October. ("What will
you do if you haven't got to 5 lbs. by the end of this month?"
Henderson asks. "I'll just kill myself," the client jokes. Then
she becomes corporate: "I'll re-evaluate.") Whether all this
will win the client her promotion, Henderson cannot say.

    On a Saturday afternoon, Henderson joins another Atlanta
image consultant, Susan Bixler, in a corporate presentation. It
is an afternoon of admonitions: "Don't buy a shirt that's whiter
than your teeth . . . Do not purchase 100% linen for business
because you will look like an unmade bed by 10 a.m. . . . Accept
baldness . . . Don't try to wrap your hair around your head and
spray it in place like a helmet."

    Clearly these are not the golden secrets of anyone's
success. They do not sharpen the nation's competitive edge. But
let us not be unthankful for small things. ("Think about the
foods you order and how attractive they are to be eaten," Bixler
suggests. And would that more people did!) At least until the
Japanese get hold of it, isn't image consulting what America the
Beautiful is all about?