Work clothes

A friend of mine started a very good media internship at the beginning of summer. She’s a mother and a grad student and hip, always looks great. But she was carping about needing new clothes to look “proper” for her job.

This is something that I think about a lot. I have to go out and talk to people for my work and the vibe needs to be such that what I’m wearing, how I look, doesn’t get in the way of our communication. I need to be neutral, almost not even there. I want my sources to talk to me as they would talk to themselves in the shower (…wait, most people talk in the shower, don’t they?...) without trying to frame their message to the person opposite them with a notebook and pen.

That’s a complicated way of saying that I don’t want a retiring businesswoman that I’m profiling to look at me and go, ‘Oh, a Temescal hipster, she won’t understand.’

At the same time, I need to feel comfortable in my own professional role, which means not wearing clothes I can’t stand. I want to walk into any interview situation with confidence and grace – and feeling like ‘me.’ Too drab and I feel old (a whole other problem).

So it’s all about the clothes. On one hand, I want to look tidy and respectable, on the other hand I want to look hip and interesting to give my own confidence a boost.

This means, the bigger the interview the more time I spend choosing what to wear, yet I always end up wearing the same things.
Should I be free of props and baggage? Maybe so.

All those pajama blogger types out there have moved past this, of course. They are post-wardrobe.