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In Silicon Valley, female techies show off their Louboutins

In Silicon Valley, female techies show off their Louboutins

By Claire Cain Miller, The New York Times | Updated: 5 August 2012 20:55 IST

Last winter, Chanel flew planeloads of style setters to Las Vegas for a party celebrating Numéros Privés, an exhibition showcasing the brand at the Wynn hotel. There, guests including Diane Kruger, Jessica Alba and Rachel Zoe mingled inside a giant red-lighted replica of a black Chanel 2.55 handbag.

But when it came time for dinner, Chanel's president, John Galantic, didn't sit at a table with actresses, but one with Silicon Valley tech executives, like Marissa Mayer (wearing a gray beaded Chanel cocktail dress) and Alison Pincus (in a classic black Chanel shift).

Silicon Valley has long been known for semiconductors and social networks, not stilettos and socialites. But in a place where the most highly prized style is to appear to ignore style altogether and the hottest accessory is the newest phone, a growing group of women is bucking convention not only by being women in a male-dominated industry, but also by unabashedly embracing fashion.

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Despite the geek stereotypes of hoodie sweatshirts, flip-flops and thick glasses, it makes perfect sense, these women say, for people interested in technology to be intrigued by fashion.

"Designing software and products isn't all that different from the design of clothes," Ms. Mayer, 37, the new chief executive of Yahoo, said in an interview last February. She once paid $60,000 at an auction for lunch with Oscar de la Renta. "Like components of software," she said, "fashion designers learned how to do this shoulder, put pleats on the skirt that way."

Ms. Mayer, who for years was responsible for the design of Google's search engine, proved her point when she asked Naeem Khan to make the dress for her wedding to Zachary Bogue, a financier, in 2009. She gave the designer a spec (a set of requirements that engineers write for new products) for the gown, including scalloped trim, an A-line skirt and lace, preferably with snowflakes.

"A side zip was eliminated because it would get caught on the lace and embroidery, so we realized that wasn't feasible from an engineering perspective," Ms. Mayer said.

Not every fashionable techie is so collaborative, but designers are nonetheless eager to explore a client base with not only money to burn but also a forward-looking ethos.

"Definitely my New York clients want to penetrate the valley," said Allison Speer, founder of Allison Speer Public Relations, who helps introduce designers to customers in Northern California. "When we opened Bottega Veneta, they said: 'We don't want the social girls who do everything. We want the up-and-coming tech girls.' "

Alice & Olivia recently opened a San Francisco store and started a career line of peplum blouses, blazers and cropped pants to cater to women in tech, said Stacey Bendet Eisner, the brand's designer.

"Women in the tech world aren't confined to wearing a standard black suit, so they can have more fun with their day clothes," Ms. Bendet Eisner said. "They also want an element of sophistication to their clothes because they want to be taken seriously. Hollywood women are more focused on sex appeal."

FOR the men who have so long dominated Silicon Valley, the casualness of their clothing has seemed to bear an inverse proportion to the magnitude of their innovations. But despite Steve Jobs's baggy dad jeans, his black turtlenecks were made by Issey Miyake. And Mark Zuckerberg's signature hoodies and shower sandals are nothing if not a style statement.

As the area ages and settles, however, more of its denizens are starting to think about dressing for the office rather than the dorm room. And while some women here still worry that they will not be considered serious technologists if they care about clothes, as Katrina Garnett was in 1998, when she wore a slinky black Hervé Léger bandage dress in ads for her business software company, many are confident enough to dress the way they want to.

"Earlier in my career, if I had to choose between a skirt and being taken seriously, I would have chosen being taken seriously," said Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, 42, a former Google executive who now runs a video shopping site called Joyus and said she never leaves the house without four-inch heels and at least one vintage item. "But now I'm at a point in my career in the valley where I'm judged by what I've done."

Ruzwana Bashir, 29, a founder and chief executive of Peek, a travel start-up, said that she was surprised when she arrived in the Bay Area and discovered that some people were distrustful of fashion.

"Perhaps they think they're not taken as seriously if they make an effort," she said. "In the end, I'd rather wear a nice dress, and if someone is not going to take me seriously, that's so superficial."

For women newer to Silicon Valley, sometimes there is pressure to blend in.

"The perception in Silicon Valley is that if you dress well, you couldn't possibly be smart, or you're in P.R. but couldn't possibly run a company," said Leila Janah, 29, a tech entrepreneur who worked in New York before moving to the Bay Area. She has settled on a wardrobe of tailored Zara blazers, silk scarves she buys in India and chunky jewelry she inherited from her grandmother.

"I remember briefly attempting the Adidas and jeans and sweatshirt over T-shirt look, but I realized I was trying to dress like a young tech geek, and that just wasn't me," said Ms. Janah, the founder and chief executive of Samasource, a start-up that uses the Web to connect people in developing countries with jobs. "Fashion is expressing my aesthetic sense just as much as our Web site is."

Sorel, the boot company, asked Ms. Janah to be a spokeswoman in its ads.

In Silicon Valley, women stand out simply because they are in the minority, accounting for 5 percent of the founders and chief executives of tech start-ups, a quarter of computing professionals and 11 percent of tech investors, according to industry sources. Dressing well, said Gladys Perint Palmer, director of the fashion school at Academy of Art University in San Francisco, provides a dose of confidence.

"If a woman looks good, she feels more confident, whether she is in Silicon Valley or Hollywood," she said. "It's biological."

There are also business advantages to standing out, said Theresia Gouw Ranzetta, an investor at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm.

"When it's a sea of young guys in jeans and hoodies, and the V.C.'s are in their khakis and button-down uniform, it's kind of a benefit to be different," said Ms. Gouw Ranzetta, who compares her shoe collection to her male partners' cigars and cars. (Her favorites are Jimmy Choo and Gucci, "but if it's the weekend and I'm running around after my kids, I'm a big fan of my sparkly Converse sneakers.")

She is quick to add that ideas and skills matter most, but a nice outfit can't hurt.

"Silicon Valley is definitely a place of meritocracy, but if on top of it, if you don't happen to look like the 10 other people in the room, that's not always bad," Ms. Gouw Ranzetta said.

The look is still West Coast casual and, fittingly for women who live on the Web, mostly procured online. Ms. Mayer dresses down the latest Erdem floral dress with a cotton cardigan. The day uniform for Ms. Pincus, 37, who helped found One Kings Lane, the home-décor flash sale site, is J Brand jeans, Vince T-shirts, Isabel Marant sweaters and Céline flat boots.

But the absence of the Brooks Brothers tradition that still hovers over Wall Street and law also affords more opportunities for creativity, many women said.

"You can be this super-successful woman who's smart and effective but still feminine," said Ms. Bashir, glancing at her hot-pink Christian Louboutin heels and bright orange Hermès bracelet on a recent workday. "When I worked in finance, I didn't always think that was possible."

Ms. Singh Cassidy hunts for vintage finds, like her recent purchase of a bell-shaped Prada dress, wool on top with a taffeta skirt. She pointed out that vintage shopping is moving online as sites like Portero and TheRealReal "are finally taking vintage out of eBay and putting it in luxury Web site design."

Ms. Gouw Ranzetta worked in consulting in New York and travels East regularly for board meetings of media and e-commerce start-ups she has invested in.

"In New York retail or e-commerce or media, it's a requirement to be in the latest fashion and completely put together from head to toe," she said, "and on Wall Street, it's required to be conservatively put together from head to toe. But in Silicon Valley, as businesswomen we have no uniform. I've actually found it more freeing because I can have a little more fashion fun."

Some of Silicon Valley's best-dressed women, including Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and Juliet de Baubigny, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm, declined to be interviewed about their style. But others said that dressing well (and talking about it) could help erode the stereotypes that repel some women from the technology field.

"It's possible to hold your femininity and love of fashion," Ms. Singh Cassidy said. "Now I feel not at all at risk that people would say, 'How can she care about dressing well and run a billion-dollar company or be smart?' "

And though some Google employees rolled their eyes when Ms. Mayer appeared in Vogue and Glamour in her signature brightly colored dresses, with full skirts nipped at the waist, she said the decision was intentional.

"My willingness to talk about it is because I believe the way we'll get more people into computer science and ultimately more women into computer science is by making it really clear that you can be yourself and don't need to give up parts of yourself to succeed," she said. "You can be into fashion and you don't have to be the pasty white programmer with a pocket protector staying up all night."

© 2012, The New York Times News Service

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