Dressing for success is less about the right cut of jacket and more about bringing an everyday polish to the package you are at work. You may not realize what your personal dress code says about you. Step back and examine yourself the way you think others would. Get a few photos snapped in work gear so you have a concrete idea of how you are presenting yourself beyond the hurried adjustments in the mirror in the morning.

 

We've all read the articles about the dos and don'ts of work wardrobe. That's old news. You're now moving on to going beyond the obvious ‘no no's' to incorporate both your goals and work philosophy in your ensemble. Didn't know it was possible? Read on.

 

A few guidelines are key. Keeping every outfit polished is overdressing in a positive way. You are going to look out of place wearing a suit in a jeans and t shirt zone but that doesn't give you a license to slop out. Making sure your jeans are a tailored fit, not too tight, and definitely not baggy; with a fitted t-shirt and blazer style jacket is a good kind of casual. You want to be the same level of dressed up or above as the clients coming into the business. It does not inspire their confidence to be handing their business over to someone who's dressed like the teenager running their child's day camp.

 

This is not to say corporate dress has to be devoid of all personality. It fact, some worker bees' work dress makeover should go the other way. Where they are trying too hard (which runs the same risks as trying too hard to be cool as a kid) to toe the line and wear safe things, they run the risk of becoming cubicle wallpaper. Staying in the safe zone does not mean dressing to be invisible. Stay modest and free from inflammatory political dress. The only possible exception could be a non-profit political climate. For most people, however, when working with the general public in an office setting; it is best to go with ‘non-offensive to all' style favorable to yourself.

 

Ask yourself where you are and where you want to go career wise? Does your style reflect it? For instance, whether you are working on attracting new roles to yourself or are bringing more authenticity to your workplace, those need different approaches. You can brainstorm to get what you want out of your existing wardrobe. Be free in your approach to new looks. Throw all the ideas out there. Spend some time with an unforgiving mirror and an idea of what someone with your dream job description would wear. Wear that. Some of your initial ideas might not work but you can trial run them before you go. Most experimentation should not be done on company time. You don't want your fashion don'ts to be the highlight of the Monday AM meeting. Wear your new work look out socially first if it's a far cry from what you normally do. Gauge reactions to it or see if it's as comfortable or as low maintenance as you first thought.

 

Being well dressed isn't a guarantee of plum assignments, but it can definitely be part of your game plan. You may have in the past underestimated how much dressing can impact your career. You may even feel irritated by it all: the marketing, the consumerism, and the minutiae of tights versus bare legs. You feel you have more important things to concern yourself with. While it is good to not get caught up in fashion vapidness even from a time efficiency perspective, it is naïve to write the matter of dressing off completely as you go about putting great effort into each of your other parts of work.

 

Small things really do make a difference. Putting a bit of funk into the corporate uniform that looks nothing like the punk princess that you are on the weekend makes sense. It brings you fully to the job. That said, there needs to be a bit of a boundary. Not that your work and play wardrobes can't have overlap, but it's probably not a bad idea to have others be able to tell if it's a day on or a day off. If you are meeting clients on the weekend or after-hours as well - this may be more common if you're self employed and work seeps into a lot of your life - it's a good idea to dress up a bit for all of life.

 

Wardrobe can play helpful assistant to other parts of your life too. If you are having a hard time drawing the line between workplace and your front door and you are an employee who needs work balance defined, having something else to change into after the commute can make all the difference. It does not need to be a drastically different look, but one that tells you that the shift has changed. Just like you would limit a personal call at work, you are now limiting work to a few sketched ideas at home. This weekend make the work you bring home a fashion magazine and a notepad and see if you can't launch into that fabulous new position with the look that goes with it.<