How to Dress for a Boardroom That Isn't New York or London

The first time I walked into a boardroom as a decision-maker and not an observer, I wore a grey trouser suit. It had been bought six months earlier because an American magazine had said that was the correct silhouette for serious women in serious rooms. In Lagos, in September, on the twelfth floor of a glass building with intermittent air-conditioning, I spent the meeting more uncomfortable than any of the men at the table and read, for the first time, that the rule I had been given was not written for me.

The advice most women get on boardroom dressing — a grey pantsuit and pearls — is accurate for one specific kind of room in one specific climate. It is not accurate for most of the boardrooms actual grown women in this part of the world walk into. The room is warmer. The table is smaller. The meeting is longer. The wardrobe needs to be read differently.

The room you are actually walking into. It is air-conditioned but unreliably. It has between six and twelve people. You are often the only woman or one of two. The meeting is scheduled for an hour and will run two. Lunch will be brought in. The question is not whether your outfit looks authoritative in a still photograph. The question is whether you still look like yourself after the third hour.

Three silhouettes that work.

One. The tailored two-piece in a saturated colour. Jacket and trouser, same fabric, mid-weight wool or a wool-viscose. In terracotta, deep green, burgundy, or ink. The reason this works in a non-Western boardroom and the grey suit does not is that it reads as deliberate. A grey suit reads as borrowed from a bank. A saturated two-piece reads as a woman who chose. The table will register the difference within the first thirty seconds, which is the window you have before the meeting starts.

Two. The column dress with a structured jacket. Floor-length or mid-calf column in a mid-weight crêpe, under a cropped jacket in a contrasting fabric. In ink with a cream jacket, or burgundy with a black one. This is the silhouette for the meeting where you will also be photographed — a signing, a panel, a launch — because it photographs as one clean line from the neckline to the hem, and a photograph is a document you will reuse for five years.

Three. The high-rise trouser with a silk shirt. No jacket. The trouser does the structuring; the shirt does the softening. A real-waist wool trouser and a heavy silk shirt in a tonal colour — cream under camel, ivory under ink. This is the silhouette for the Monday meeting that is not a pitch and not a signing. It reads as a woman at work, not a woman performing work, which is the register most of us are actually trying to hit.

Fabric, specifically for the climate. Mid-weight wool over polyester. Silk over rayon. Crêpe over jersey. Polyester does not breathe and will photograph damp by the afternoon. Wool breathes better than most women think, and a mid-weight tropical wool is engineered for exactly the climate most Nigerian and Kenyan boardrooms sit in. The fabric is the single biggest difference between a woman who looks fresh at four in the afternoon and a woman who does not.

What not to wear. Stiletto. The boardroom floor is tiled or stone, and a heel that clicks is a heel the room is paying attention to. A block heel or a clean loafer is more senior, not less. No short sleeve — an arm covered to the elbow reads as more senior in almost every room, and this is a register-rule, not a modesty-rule. No visible logo, ever. The room already knows the brand. They are reading you, not the brand.

The one-line rule. If there is a single rule for dressing in a boardroom that is not in New York or London, it is this: Dress like the meeting will run two hours longer than it is scheduled to, because it will. Comfort at the third hour is the silhouette. Everything else is noise.