"Business Casual"
[ 31 May 2007 ]
“I’m sure you’re quite shuddering at the thought of business casual… I, however, am about to graduate and start up year-long fellowship with a non-profit that’s basically a 9-to-5 office job. What would you advise for someone with a limited budget who needs to look professional but still wants to change around her style and look somewhat interesting? As of now, I tend to go with brightly colored basics, graphic t-shirts, and very few accessories… I’d love to hear anything you have to say, thanks so much.”
You’re so right! Business casual… bleccch! 
Grotesque facial expressions aside, I am not the best person to ask about this sort of thing. I am often vastly inappropriate. I have always been on the fringes of my work’s dress code, partly due to boredom & partly due to a general feeling of awkwardness about rules & regulations. When I worked at Lush Cosmetics, for example, the rule was “black & white only” which soon bored me, & I started working in touches of hot pink, turquoise & blue before coming to work looking like a rainbow (& in blatant violation of the dress code).
I have been extremely lucky however, in that I have had a lot of so-called “corporate” jobs where the dress code just wasn’t that strict. (I did fair chunks of time at ISPs & telecommunications companies, where they tend to be a bit more relaxed about these kinds of things. I think it’s the large geek contingent that does it, quite frankly.) Here are some outfits I wore to my job at Telecom: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8. For the most part, the people around me liked seeing what I came to work in, it was often a topic of discussion & provided some much-needed distraction from returning boring phonecalls or whatever else was on the agenda. However, on the flip-side, I’m pretty sure that my wearing combat boots to work was part of the reason one of my other temping contracts “ended early”... so proceed with caution!
Perhaps the best way to approach work in a “business casual” environment is to imagine yourself as a different character. Some kind of femme fatale, perhaps, who wears spike heels & a pencil skirt & a tailored white shirt. It might not be your style, but it will look good — which is pretty much the mantra I assigned to office jobs while I was in them. I often found that I had to pretend to be someone else just to get through the day: someone who cared about invoices & spreadsheets, rather than ME, the weird girl who needs music to work effectively (a disco at your desk is great at about 3pm) & likes her hair as big as possible.
If you don’t want to fake it — & I don’t blame you — dress like yourself, but imagine your mother is there while you’re choosing your outfit. Run her voice through your head. “Those shoes are completely impractical!” “I think that skirt is a bit short.” “Oh, you just CANNOT wear that.” (If your mother is awesome, like mine, pretend one of the women on Coronation Street is your ma instead.)
As long as you’re not in a super-strict office environment, where everyone wears suits (zzzzzzz), you can probably get away with a reasonably plain top, a cardigan & a pair of nice pants or a skirt.
Women can chuck a conservative-looking sweater over the top of a dress to make it a little less extravagant. You’ll never go wrong with a long black skirt & boots, or well-cut trousers. If you’re allowed to wear jeans, go for it — wear nice ones (no rips or frayed cuffs!) with a tailored sweater or shirt. Not so bad. Really, it will be hard for them to complain if what you’re wearing fits properly & is clean. If you want to spice it up, wear weird jewellery or buy an insane bag.
Men have less options. Wear a nice shirt (top button undone & untucked if you want to be more casual), good pants & clean shoes. If you can get away with a t-shirt, great! Wear a well-fitted new one, like something from Threadless.
If you’re really feeling the need to rebel, maybe write “I HATE MY JOB” on your stomach, backward, in marker pen, so you can pull up your shirt in the office bathroom & sneer in the mirror while you read it!
My final suggestion is to make friends with your manager, so that they’ll defend you if anyone balks at your colourful eye-shadow!
Good luck!
Super-love & cupcakes,
Gala 
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hee hee, lucky me I get to wear a white lab coat all day!
Although I secretly covet those preppy pristine lawyer type girls in their office wear..
I completely love the green outfit, which I think is “6”. You are rocking the hoodie-over-dress thing impressively hard.
The thing with business casual is that it so often is deadly boring (head-to-toe BLACK!), but it doesn’t have to be. Back in the day when I used to have to dress smartly for work (pre-1999) I used to mix it up with colour, especially in my tailored waistcoats. (It was the 90s, OK?) I had a super-bright red one, a deep blue velvet one, and my personal fave was a brown fitted corset-style tapa-cloth-print one. Oooh yeah! I used to make a lot of my own clothes, so could easily indulge my taste for conservative sihouettes in eye-catching fabrics.
The only thing I have consistently missed about my previous career is the opportunity to dress up and look sharp&snappy!
Nadine — Thank you, I like that outfit too but I look pretty demented! Head-to-toe black is for morticians, & it absolutely soul-crushing to have to wear it every day. (Those who choose to are a different story, but when you’re forced into a monochromatic palette things can get ugly.) A coloured shirt or stockings or SOMETHING can make all the difference & is an easy way to try colour without it being too threatening.
Your tailored waistcoats sound “devoon”, as they say in Grease ;>
It’s funny, I went from working at a “goth” shop, where I was encouraged to wear anything from corsets to sky-high platforms to PVC, in every different permutation of black, to a tea shop. And yet, at the tea shop, I have to wear…. black.
And I was looking forwards to getting more colour in my life!
So basically, I’m wearing more or less the same things, just slightly less extreme….
when i worked for the devil, i would cry about having to wear the ill fitting acc supplied wardrobe. ever since then i have made sure i have worked in small offices that dont care about dress codes, and i can wear whatever i fancy.
i love your outfit 6 so much! i don’t think i’ve ever mixed all green pieces yet it is my favorite color.
and the boots in 7…i’ve been searching for boots like that for sooooooo long.
I can’t believe this is almost 15 years ago now (gads, I’m getting old!), but when I worked at the World Bank I really pushed the limits of office-acceptable. It happened gradually; I tried to fit in with the conservative dress, but a little more of my personality came out every day. I found that shopping from the sale rack in Nordstrom’s Savvy department helped me look like I might belong in an office while still having an independent style. (Plus, I often wore Doc Martens 10-eyes with my short-skirted suits. :) After I’d been there for a couple years I pulled out the hair dye and never looked back. My colleagues and superiors actually started voting for hair colors! I think the moral of my story is: give your co-workers a chance to get to know you and your style. Push a little at a time, and you’ll end up with more leeway than you thought possible.
I noticed something while looking over your outfits when working at Telecom, you used to have a more grungy/thread bare look to your fashion, whereas now you seem a lot neater and more polished. I find this quite fascinating because I thought you would’ve always been neat and polished – it’s nice to see :)
Gala – wow! that’s an interesting thought… I understand it and accept it but I personally think that grunge is a style in it’s own right, some peeps, yes are just plain sloppy but other’s have a perfectly constructed bunch of layered scruffy loveliness. And I likes it :)
I also love the neat and polished – I am both at various moments, but I have noticed the older I have gotten the more polished I am. xo