Atlanta, Georgia Image Wilting?

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?