I can relate to Maya's wardrobe conundrum - how do you dress business-casual (that's what it sounds like she needs) and not just look like everyone else, wearing some kind of wide-legged pants and this season's style in floaty tops? When I was in a client-facing role I usually wore a lot of black, nicely fitted, and if I didn't look original at least I didn't hate myself. The dry-cleaning bill sucked, though.
But these days I have sort of an opposite problem. Although I work in an office (a real live cube farm!), it's pretty casual - jeans every day is not a problem, and most of the developers wear a jeans-and-t-shirt sort of uniform. In my company clothing divides along male/female and career lines - men are more casual than women and sales and marketing tends to be more dressed up than dev. Managers are usually more dressed up than us regular folks, and female managers dress up more than male managers. There are individual exceptions to all these rules - I am one of them, totally letting the marketing side down with my slobbiness - but in the main they hold true, and I've seen these roles play out in more than one company.
I love the casual and take as much advantage of it as possible, but it allows me to be lazy - I end up rotating the same three pairs of jeans and my favorite sweaters until it's all way past its sell-by date. And while there's something to be said, I guess, for thriftily wearing your clothes until they've got holes in them, usually the clothes start to look pretty bedraggled long before the holes appear.
It's not really that I can't afford new clothes (although that was the issue for a while), and it's not that I hate shopping (I don't; stuff off the rack usually looks pretty good). It's that I'm lazy and time-impaired. Too time-impaired to consider shopping as a leisure activity (when I could be reading or cooking or blogging or going for a walk or playing with the cats or learning how to knit or sew or whatever; my list of leisure activities is long and ambitious) and I'm too lazy to put together interesting outfits based on what lives in my closet.
Occasionally, if Dave has a show or something, I'll pull an outfit together. But the rest of the time it's jeans and a sweater and no makeup, and yeah my clothes fit and yeah I have a good haircut and yeah my glasses are kind of cute, but as a whole it lacks pizazz. I don't feel cute unless I've at least got a little makeup on and have a somewhat pulled-together outfit. But since I don't have (or don't make) the time for this in the morning (usually too busy medicating cats and blogging), frumpy is my default go-to. Which I'm not totally thrilled about, honestly, but I lack the discipline to dress for success just because I ought to. Even though I bet my dressing badly is actually a factor, conscious or not, in management decisions not to promote me or whatever. So - if I want a promotion, which would be nice at some point, I definitely should start dressing better. This will require me to spend more time on myself (good), focus more on my appearance (maybe good, maybe not) and will require some discipline (ugh).
I will let you know how it turns out, if a promotion shows up despite my t-shirts and jeans. I sort of hate having to think about this at all, because in my head, how I look isn't related to the quality of the work I produce, but in the real world (outside my head), how I look matters a whole big bunch.
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My last department was almost all guys, and I learned to dress like them, more-or-less. When all the men are wearing khakis and oxford shirts, something similar seemed like the way to go.
In this department, jeans are okay and now I think it's my duty to wear them. The younger women spend so much time and money and energy on fashionable clothes and impractical but stylish shoes and elegant hair and makeup. Honestly, they just aren't paid enough to be a Glamour Do every day. Maybe my more neutral, not-overtly-feminine appearance will take some of the pressure off them.
I don't think there's any single right answer, but the older I get, the more I rebel against the idea that looking pretty should be part of my job description. Clean and tidy is adequate.
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