Style: Show us power without the power-dressing: Reggie Nadelson urges Hillary Clinton to discard the suits that dominate Washington and put on some style - some trousers even

Here is the urgent question on the lips of the nation: will Hillary Clinton bring style to the working women of America, to Washington DC, headquarters of bad fashion? At the junction of politics and rock'n'roll, where the First Lady has a brain of her own and her husband knows the entire works of Elvis Presley by heart, will the American woman stride forward towards real power sans hair band, sans suit? Will she, God forbid, wear trousers?

Although fashion will always be set in New York City (with the exception of Los Angeles), Washington much more perfectly holds the mirror up to styles for working women in the rest of the country. Nancy Reagan did not count because she did not work and her idea of high style was a high price tag. Which of us would want to copy a look as rigid as that hair? . But Hilary Clinton is one of us, a real, normal, working women. And this is, after all, our year. In this Year of the Woman, women will claim a fair number of seats in the House of Representatives, a corner of power in the executive branch and, in the Senate, a lavatory of their own.

This new breed of Capitol woman is in a position to take the curse off style, to repeal the unofficial law that says dreary, dull and invisible equals serious in the capital of frump. In Washington, as someone said, the perception of naked flesh - we are talking collarbones here - is akin to that in Saudi Arabia. In Washington you will find no Lycra, no Lurex, no trouser suits, no coloured tights, no spike heels, no short skirts and, in a city that is as humid as the tropics in summer, no bare legs. Of Washington, said Georgette Mosbacher, the glamorous Texas wife of the former Secretary of Commerce: 'If you're blonde, you're dumb. If you wear mascara, you can't read. If you use hairspray, your brain has atrophied.'

A desire for something different might lead to, at best, an outbreak of whimsy: Barbara Bush in her puffed-sleeve frock and trainers, Margaret Tutwiler's sailor dress, the Laura Ashley blouses and velvet hair bands which announce, in Washington terms, that this woman is politically correct.

Ruffled frocks in pastel hues by night notwithstanding, here is a town where success dressing still means the suit. The suit, that is, almost exactly as it was in its infancy in the Seventies. Whereas men had worn more or less the same uniform for about a century, I remember reading once that women had 'no collective memory for how to dress for business'. Like some Jungian engineer of the female wardrobe id, John T Molloy gave them one in 1977.

For women, suiting up for success was codified in that year when Mr Molloy published The Woman's Dress for Success Book. For the first time in recent years a 'scientific' tome gave specific instruction on how to dress to succeed in business rather than how to dress to get a husband. As a result, crowds of cloned drones, Stakhanovites in stockings and trainers (exchanged at the office for plain flat shoes), hurried to work in grey or navy suits and blouses with pussycat bows: monstrous regiments of women uniformed in Early Maggie Thatcher.

The Woman in the Grey Flannel Suit became a metaphor that meant business. The suit became a semiotic clue, a signal that said: woman at work. Lawyers, bankers, accountants now had a costume, so did lobbyists and bureaucrats and politicians. Nowhere was the suit so well suited as it was to Washington. And it came at a time when women were beginning to join the professional ranks. Before, because there were so few women in power, the very grand could be eccentric - the late Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick smoked a pipe - and the rest wore the formal styles of their day, maybe taking cues from whatever First Lady was on duty: Eleanor Roosevelt in her Thirties dresses and fox furs; Mamie Eisenhower in big-skirted New Look frocks with white gloves; Rosalynn Carter in home-made dresses; Jackie Kennedy's pill-box hat.

To some minds, the suit was protection, feminist armour of a kind. Mr Molloy said 'dressing to succeed in business and dressing to be sexually attractive are almost mutually exclusive'. You could not show off and sound off. You could not look girlish or you were dumb. If you looked expensive, you were on the make - most likely an actress or hooker.

Washington was especially receptive to Mr Molloy's view. It was, first of all, a provincial city where style was considered seditious. And it was not a sexy place. Notes the writer, Nancy Collins: 'Sensual people are not drawn to government. Men in government are the most sexually repressed men on earth and that sexual repression spills out on to government wrens.'

So there we were in the Seventies, with radical feminists telling us we could not dress sexy and be serious, and conservative males telling us we could not climb the executive ladder without dressing drearily. As a result of this unconscious but ironclad alliance of puritans, the suit has survived a long time in the corridors of power. The weird thing was, now that women had acceded to dressing like men, they were denied its comforts: trousers were, more or less, prohibited.

Women have, of course, worn some version of male clothing since Amelia Bloomer gave the world hideous sports gear in the 1850s, and Georges Sand put on trousers. In the Thirties and Forties, film stars with an image as independent women - Dietrich, Hepburn, Garbo - wore them.

In the Sixties, everyone climbed into jeans. Of the great advances of the early Seventies, as crucial to the liberation of women as the pill, the portable hairdryer and tights, was the trouser suit. And then, just as women started working in droves and feminism gave them a leg up, the dress-for- success suit became a uniform and trousers were out. In the film, Working Girl, when secretary Melanie Griffith reinvented herself as a power-woman, she borrowed the suits of her boss, Sigourney Weaver.

Take Ann Hopkins. A hot-shot accountant at Price Waterhouse in Washington in the late Eighties, she wore a suit all right but was refused promotion; she said it was because she had been required to 'walk more femininely and wear make-up'. She took her case all the way to the Supreme Court and won. On the other hand, Brenda Taylor, an assistant state attorney in Florida, was scolded because she liked bright tights, short skirts and high heels.

More recently, Pat Schroeder the Congresswoman from Colorado who shows a bit of unpretentious style and sometimes wears green, was told she looked 'un-presidential'; Susan Molinari, a New York Republican, was deluged with phone calls because she appeared in Congress wearing trousers. And when Anita Hill showed up for the Clarence Thomas hearings in a turquoise suit, you could feel folk trying to read the colour for meaning.

It is now 1993 and, according to Vogue, 'women at work have reclaimed their sexuality'. In the Eighties, fashion included bustles and bustiers, Dynasty and tie-dyes. Now that women have been working in power jobs for years, things seem to be loosening up. New-fangled feminists, such as Camille Paglia, say that if we've got it we should flaunt it. Not that you can go to your law office in Lycra leggings and leotards, but you can wear a Donna Karan body suit under your tight-waisted jacket, or a Ralph Lauren trouser suit in pinstripes. In New York, that is.

Pinstriped trouser suits might be worn around the world, according to Vogue and New York City, but not in the provinces and not in Washington DC. Last week I watched the Congressional freshmen sworn in and almost all the women were in suits and most of their skirts were below the knee.

Hope resides with Hillary Clinton. She is the first powerful professional woman in her own right to play First Lady. On the campaign trail, she and vice-presidential wife, Tipper Gore, did wear suits but the colours were hot and sometimes the skirts were short, sort of. 'Historically,' says Stuart Ewen, a New York media professor, 'reform clothing movements have come when issues of gender and equality have been percolating.' As of Wednesday, the nation will be perusing Hillary Clinton's wardrobe to deconstruct its meaning, to figure out if the new First Lady will set a brand new style. After all, she is married to a man who, as someone said, is younger than Mick Jagger.

(Photographs omitted)