Dress for Success

If you work (or have worked before) in an office, what is your office dress code?

By and far in my industry, we stick to business-casual unless we are meeting with clients. Colleagues at other agencies seem to follow the same protocol, as do most of my friends in the rest of the business world. Men in slacks and button ups or polos, women in skirts, dresses, and nice shirts.

Side note: The few of you out there that get to wear jeans to your job every day, I am jealous. Though, I would have to go buy a lot of new jeans to be able to do that anyways. I only have one or two pair I wear for Jeans Fridays right now :)

I am a big believer in the idea of "dress for the job you want, not the job you have." How does your boss dress? How do your other superiors dress? How can you emulate their style, while also retaining some of your own and dressing to your age? For me, I like to mix business casual attire like pencil skirts and vests, while adding in some flair with accessories or a pair of hott heels like the ones I am sporting today...



Did you hear about the girl that got fired for wearing clothes that were deemed "too sexy" for her job at Citibank? This hit the news last week, and I must say, I feel slightly bad for the girl. She is a natural stunner, and most of her outfits are trendy yet fairly professional. However, I can totally see how her way-tight pencil skirts and clingy shirts might begin to cross that line of work-appropriate, especially for the banking industry, one of the most conservative ones there is.

Today I was sitting outside grabbing a bite to eat, and out of the high-rise comes a group of business men and women heading to lunch, all dressed in typical business casual. Slacks, button ups, heels, pearls. All, but one. One girl was wearing short-shorts with a cuff. Not unlike the ones you can see me in on the weekends, the ones from Target I have talked about.

She had paired similar mid-thigh cuffed shorts with heels and a button-up of some sort. Cute? Yes. Work appropriate? I had to force myself from not staring at her because I couldn't get over how UN-work appropriate I thought it was. I would wear an outfit like that out on a weekday night, but never in to the office. Plus, I am pretty sure the office fluorescents wouldn't do much for my pasty white legs ...

Every office is different, though. What is it like in your office? Casual? Formal business? Something in between?