The Beginning of a Series
This is the first in a series of articles where I share my favorite work essentials. No gatekeeping here! My goal for this series is to empower women with the information to make their best career wardrobe choices.
Why You Should Care about Your Work Wardrobe
As a woman, dressing for the office can be challenging and more difficult than our male counterparts. A work wardrobe often provides the first impression of your profession. For men, distinguishing between professional and casual dress is relatively straightforward. For women, this is not so easy, due to the amount of choices women have and how these choices are continuously evaluated based on varying professional expectations. For example, my male colleagues can quickly go from business casual to business formal by putting on a tie and a jacket. I believe it can be as easy for women, if we build the right foundation of wardrobe items that incorporate culture, fashion trends, sustainability, and generational preferences. That’s why I am on a journey to help women build a foundational work wardrobe that is professional and easy to accomplish.
Having a foundational work wardrobe is even more important today, as we move to a post-pandemic work environment (at least, I hope that we can start to resume normal life) that has further complicated the wardrobe choices for women. This new world of work may include working in an office or hybrid work that is any combination of virtual, remote, or in-office. This presents the perfect opportunity to think or rethink the wardrobe items that serve as the foundation of your work closet.
Understanding Your Work Environment
Your work environment provides the context for your work wardrobe. For example, I work in the financial services industry in New York City as a technology investor for a large asset manager. I primarily work in the office every day. My role requires a business professional dress code that is more formal than others in my industry. I do not need to dress in a suit every day. However, I do need to be flexible and prepared for scheduled and impromptu meetings with business founders or executives. In other words, I need to be prepared to be in formal business attire if required. Below are the main challenges I have faced while selecting work clothes that meet all these requirements.
- Feeling like my personality is muted by what I am wearing or feeling so uncomfortable in the clothes that it becomes a distraction.
- Arriving to the office to notice that I missed the mark and am either over- or under-dressed, even after spending several minutes debating what I should wear.
- Spending a significant amount of money on a clothing item that looks terrible after a cycle in the washing machine. I either have to sacrifice quality or money.
- Wearing uncomfortable shoes on days that I am running around the city.
- Not supporting sustainable brands due to lack of information about how a brand’s clothes are made.
After many discussions with my friends, I noticed that these issues are fairly common. So how have I managed to choose the essential wardrobe elements so that I can go from business casual to formal as required by the work events in my day-to-day activities? I credit my three years of experience working on Wall Street in financial advisory and investment banking for my ability to identify flexible work attire that’s worth the investment.
How to Identify Your Own Work Context
Below are key questions to ask yourself before you start to build your foundational work wardrobe. Going through these questions and noting your answers will help better tailor this series to YOU and help you get the most value. Not everyone has the same work context, so the mission of this series is to give advice that can extend across various work environments.
- What industry do you work in?
- Does your employer note a specific clothing style in the employee handbook?
- Are you in a client-facing role? If so, what type of clients do you interact with? How do the clients dress?
- How often do you work in the office?
- When in the office, are you sitting with only your team or are multiple teams working in the same place? Does each team have its own culture? Does the difference in culture translate to different work wardrobe styles?
- What kind of clothing do you wear when you are not at work? Are there certain fabrics you prefer? Are there certain silhouettes that you prefer?
What’s Next: Shoes
Finding the core pieces to your work wardrobe will significantly decrease the amount of time you spend each day searching for the right outfit, allow you to invest in the right pieces, and let your personality shine through so that your clothes are never a distraction. The next article will focus on footwear that are closet staples, so stay tuned! I hope that you engage with this article on the SWAAY platform as well as through my social media channels (Instagram and TikTok).
