EXPERTS GIVE MARTHA AN 'F' FOR FASHION
By JULIA LEVY
The Sun - Jan 27, 2004

It's nobody's business how Martha Stewart dresses a salad, but gurus of fashion and courtroom etiquette say she needs better advice when it comes to dressing herself.

Before Ms. Stewart showed up in court last week to meet the New Yorkers who will decide if she's guilty, experts were saying she should wear basic, ladylike business suits and low-key jewelry. But her court clothes were far from basic, and her jewelry was anything but low-key.

"She's made a few crucial mistakes," said image consultant Elena Castaneda, describing a parade of fashion blunders. "Although Martha is not known for her fashion style, it would be a big mistake to make any drastic changes to her understated fashion look; any change would come across untrue.... translates into guilty."

When Ms. Stewart first came to court to meet potential jurors Tuesday, she showed up carrying two leather totes, one of which cost upward of $12,000.

The next day, she came wearing a thin, black leather jacket instead of a suit jacket to match her gray pants. As if a leather jacket in court wasn't bad enough, she threw a pretentious cable knit cashmere sweater around her shoulders.

On Day 3, she wore the ornament that has gotten the worst reviews, a three-inch solid gold cross, embellished with a giant ruby. Friday, she came in cute high-heel black ankle boots and cream-colored tights.

 "You're trying to bond with this jury.You're trying to make them identify with you and sympathize with you. You don't want to throw up any barriers," said a former federal prosecutor who's now a jury consultant at Dimitrius & Associates, Walter Becker. "If you create unofficial barriers through clothing, that's dangerous."

He said men might not notice how expensive Ms. Stewart's bag was, but women certainly would, and they might become jealous. Also, he said, the cross she wore Thursday could offend almost everyone.

"Would a Jewish person be turned off by that? I don't know, but why take that risk?" he said, adding that observant Christians might also be offended by its decorativeness.

Ms. Castaneda saw the pictures of Ms. Stewart entering the courthouse each day, but she had no idea what exactly was going on beneath her overcoats.. When told of Ms. Stewart's gaudy cross necklace, she wondered aloud, "Is she out of her mind?"

She said if an average woman wore a similar ornament, everyone would assume it was costume jewelry. But on Ms. Stewart, one of the most successful women in America, everyone's going to assume it's real.

"That doesn't bring her down to the level of the average person, and those are the people who are going to judge her," she said. "When someone's having trouble paying their Con Edison bill it has to slant them a little."

The same goes for other outfits Ms. Stewart wore to court. Ms. Castaneda called the "Birkin" bag Ms. Stewart has been lugging around a "status symbol on Park Avenue," and she said after a quick glimpse at Ms. Stewart's pearls on Day 1, she suspected they were from the South Sea, and said they probably cost about $100,000.

"That is recognizably very pretentious," she said.

A behavioral science professor at the University of Chicago, Reid Hastie, said juries spend most of their time "trying to construct a story to summarize and explain the evidence."

Different people put the evidence presented in the courtroom into their own individual contexts.

"One of the crucial pieces of the story is the characters in the story," said Mr. Hastie, who has written books on jury behavior.

"Dressing in a certain way or acting in a certain way or talking in a certain way is what kind of character a defendant is communicating to the jury…. It's very hard to resist the vivid impression you have of what the person's like from seeing them in a courtroom."