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It turns out that employers and Human Resources departments are googling candidates for employment or promotion and checking out their Facebook pages to see what they say about themselves.
Uploaded photos are considered to be a good indicator of a person’s view of themselves, because that’s what they’ve chosen to show the world – so those dodgy pictures of you (male) in a mankini or (female) taking part in a wet T-shirt contest, might be doing you real harm in the career stakes.
On the other hand, smart casual clothing, a big smile and photographs in which you’re just one figure in a big group can all enhance your employment prospects because the right clothing, a happy face and a big circle of friends all tend to convince the viewer that you’re adaptable, popular and intelligent.
So what should you wear in your Facebook profile picture to get a job? A fresh polo-shirt and chinos is the favoured look for the under forty male, while the under forty female should choose a dress or skirt (the skirt should cover her knees and the sleeves of her top should cover her shoulders, but it appears any amount of cleavage doesn’t influence an employer).
It’s even more important for the over forties – men shouldn’t wear a tie because it looks ‘old and sad’ and should have their shirtsleeves, if long, rolled up a few inches to suggest they are active and practical, not stuffy and hierarchical – soft shirts are preferable to stiff starched ones. Women should ensure they don’t show bingo arms or appear in ‘mother of the bride’ type dresses – jeans are good for slim older women, and the more casual the clothing they can get away with, the better, so a contemporary T-shirt with well-fitting jeans would be ideal.
For all ages, it’s important to look fit and healthy, so pictures taken out doors in sports clothing, are a good idea, as long as they aren’t your profile picture – even a blurry picture of the back of your jacket as you walk the dog on a rainy day is enough to give a potential employer the impression that you’re dedicated to doing your duty.
Recent psychological research suggests that to impress a new prospective partner, you should not go all out with special clothing on your first date.
Instead, you should focus on where you met and what you were both wearing, and then upgrade that clothing just one level. So if you met in a library and you were wearing a polo-shirt and jeans, your upgrade might be to a comfortable shirt and jeans and the ideal date location might be a museum or gallery.
If, on the other hand, you met playing football in the park, in shorts and a vest, you might want to upgrade that sports clothing to a pair of casual trousers and a fun printed T-shirt and arrange a date to watch a sporting event.
The idea is that people agree to go out with other people for the first time when they feel comfortable with them, so if you escalate your clothing out of their comfort zone of your new mate, you cause what psychologists cause a ‘disconnect’ between the two versions of you that they are exposed to.
Women are particularly prone to this, and turn up for first dates in sparkly dresses and high heels when they were previously wearing jeans and a feminine hoodie, causing their poor date to think somebody else has turned up in their place! This means that the activities that would have seemed natural if you’d been in more relaxed clothing now become impossible in the mind of your potential partner, and so he or she suggests doing something that neither of you will enjoy so much, but that seems in keeping with your more formal clothing and so neither of you have a good time and one date is as far as you get.
If you have any kind of team: sales team at work, football team that plays for fun, pub quiz team, you can use promotional clothing like printed T-shirts or embroidered sweatshirts to increase motivation.
The most successful teams all have the same behaviours – they are groups where each member of the team knows their own strengths and how their strengths support the general team to achieve its aims, whether they are to hit a sales target or to score more goals.
Knowing each person’s roles and special skills can be developed by showing their specialist abilities on their team clothing, so a quiz team might all wear the same embroidered sweatshirts with a cartoon mascot on them, but also have nicknames printed on the back, or a sales team might be rewarded by having a special ‘golden’ vest that is worn on dress down Friday by the person who has made the most sales in that week.
Alternatively you can encourage skills development and team thinking by dividing an already existing team in two, like the girls and boys in the popular TV series Glee, and forcing them to compete with each other as well as competing against other teams. Do this by putting one team in one colour clothing, say red polo shirts, and the other team in green. Their incentive could be that the team that scores most goals in practice gets to leave the pitch without helping tidy up, or in business the team that makes most cold calls might be rewarded with doughnuts and coffee the following Monday morning.
Make sure you mix up the mini-teams on a regular basis, so that everybody gets to know the strengths and abilities of all team members – this creates respect and understanding.
The adoption of dress-down Friday has become commonplace across the world and more businesses, everywhere, are also moving to a position of allowing their staff to dress casually every day.
Casual clothing, like polo-shirts, has become business standard for several reasons:
1. Polo shirts are easy for everybody to wear, while clothing that is more constricting, such as shirts with stiff collars, cuff buttons and so on can present particular problems for people who have mobility problems or disabilities, or who are outside the standard size range.
2. Polo shirts are also easy to launder, so there’s no excuse for people not to look good. They don’t require ironing although they look ultra-smart when pressed and they work well with casual or smart trousers or jeans, and with skirts.
3. Polo shirts and other items of casual clothing are more comfortable, so staff feel better and are more productive, especially when the working day is long and they are under stress.
4. Polo-shirts and T-shirts can easily be printed or embroidered with company logos and messages to increase public awareness of the company.
So if your employer hasn’t moved to dress-down Friday or to a more casual clothing style, why not mention all the ways they’ll benefit if they do?
With the World Cup coming up, many a fan is about to invest in a commemorative team shirt and will want to both wear it and keep it perfect. The collectors who invest in such clothing never even open the packet, so they can sell their shirt in ‘mint’ condition but the true fan wants his polo-shirt or team T-shirt to be on his back as he watches the match – and he also wants it to be in a condition that means he can pass it on to his son or daughter as a treasured memento.
Perhaps you have a favourite T-shirt or polo-shirt you want to keep looking good. Maybe it’s the polo-shirt you were wearing when you met the love of your life, or the lucky polo-shirt that got you through your college exams – either way, you can use a few simple rules to keep your casual clothing looking great.
Wash favourite garments inside out, and if you’re using a washing machine use a cool setting rather than hot which can damage printed T-shirts over a long time period.
One of the problems that sometimes happens with a polo-shirt is that the collar starts curling, to avoid this there are several things you can do:
• Wash your polo shirts inside out and on a cool setting as above. If you use a tumble dryer, take them out while they are still slightly damp and smooth them into shape before finishing the drying on a hanger on the washing line.
• When they are dry, fold polo shirts and T-shirts like shops do and put them in a drawer, because hanging them can stretch the shoulders which both makes them baggy and can cause collars on polo shirts to warp.
• If your collar has already begun to curl, iron it dry using a damp cotton cloth over the shirt and a short spray of starch to get it back into shape. From now on when you wash it, fasten all the collar buttons on the polo-shirt before washing to help the collar hold its shape.
Follow these rules and your T-shirts and polo shirts will stay looking great for years.
For a lot of people, T-shirts are a form of communication and what you wear can be as effective in expressing your lifestyle as your conversation, the places you visit and the music you like.
But the value of the printed T-shirt goes much further than that. In Australia, a young man who had been unemployed as a graphic designer for over a year was hired after the CEO of a design company saw him wearing a T-shirt he’d designed himself, on the street. There are many ways of promoting yourself, your business or your belief system through printed clothing and it can be as effective as taking out an advert in your local paper!
If you or one of your friends is a talented artist but struggles to get exhibitions or commissions, a short run of their most attractive or striking design, printed on a T-shirt, can draw public attention as well as validating their talent and making them feel that they are valued. If you are the artist, why not try to get half a dozen of your paintings, sculptures, photographs etc printed on T-shirts, and wear them to public events – many people find it difficult to promote themselves but if you’re wearing your art on your chest, it can be much easier to find a way to open the conversation about your work and maybe even make a sale or win a commission.
T-shirt printing is a cost-effective way to test the waters if you want to move into the creative industries. You don’t have to rent a shop and hire staff so the risk can be reduced. You can simply set up a cottage business selling your T-shirts on etsy or Folksy to build up a following. If you’re a naturally artistic person you’ll probably find it easy to choose the right images and T-shirt blanks to give the best impression, but it’s still worth listening to your T-shirt printer because they often have long experience in what actually works on fabric, and what doesn’t
Bands and musicians in particular benefit from having a teeshirt that promotes their name and music and allows their fans to show their loyalty to the next chart-topper.
Athletes can also show their aims and successes on teeshirts. If you’re running the London marathon or aiming to sail round the world, get some T-shirts printed with strong attractive images and a short text on the back of the tee, or underneath, saying what you are going to do – it’s a great way to pick up support and funding.
We’re bombarded every day with sport: Man U, fat folk dying younger, Usain Bolt, exercise preventing heart attacks … so it’s not surprising that sport clothing is one of the biggest growth areas in garment retail in the past ten years.
But if you, our your kids, take sport seriously, it can become an expensive business. Here are some tips to help you save money while staying fit:
If your child attends a school or after school sports club, talk to the coach before the new season starts and ask him or her to agree to two things: a strip colour and style that will be stuck to for three (or ideally five) years and that training sessions and ‘keep fit’ sessions, as opposed to formal matches, don’t require team kit to be worn. Two of the biggest costs for parents are when team kit changes every season and the wear and tear of having team clothing damaged during training sessions. These two agreements could halve your spending on sports kit.
Then get together with other parents and place a bulk order for sports clothing. Make sure that the person placing the order is savvy enough to negotiate the best possible discount.
Buy large quantities of clothing that all kids get through in no time. Black shorts and white T-shirts are the classics and will work for almost every sport, as well as saving ‘official’ sports clothing for actual games and tryouts.
Try and get your kids to choose sports that have complementary clothing: white polo shirts can be worn for tennis, cricket and golf, for example.
Set up a swap shop with other parents so that when your child outgrows specialist kit like printed jerseys or T-shirts with team numbers on, those items go into the pot and can be available to parents with younger children.
Get your child to pay half for specialist equipment, either in money or in completing household tasks – six week’s dog walking to help pay for a new tennis racquet, or paying half for a fantastic new warm-up hoodie can encourage them to take very good care of their kit, because they’ve made an investment in it!
In Italy it’s said that men can’t find wives because their mothers spoil them so much that no contemporary female is willing to undertake all the cosseting required to keep them happy. In Japan it’s because men expect wives to live limited lifestyles while they go out to bars and get drunk and flirt with hostesses. Around the world, the male seems to be under threat.
It’s not unusual to see men in their forties and fifties who are dressed in more or less the same clothes as a seven year old boy: T-shirt, jeans, scruffy socks and trainers. It’s as if they are demonstrating their inability to grow up through their clothing choices.
If you’re a chap, and you’re wandering around in shorts, a T-shirt emblazoned with a rock group who split up (or died) twenty years ago and mucky trainers, you are not an attractive prospect for anything but a vagrancy charge. In the office, these same men wear crumpled, stained polo-shirts, which ride up over their bellies, or hang down over their backsides, teamed with equally crumpled trousers, often with a waistband that has folded in half through age and through being worn under that low-slung belly. Not only is this unattractive to women, it’s a turn-off for recruitment and promotion. If you look like a slob, you get treated like a slob, simple as that.
So what to do?
Men could start by raising their clothing game. If you’re wearing a shirt, tuck it in. Make sure it stays tucked in. If it doesn’t, it’s the wrong size for you. Iron your polo-shirts. If you can’t manage that, put them on the washing line on a plastic coat hanger so the creases drop out. If you tumble-dry them, take them out of the machine as soon as it finishes, shake them and fold them. Don’t leave them there for days so the creases set like stone.
Throw away stained clothing. It isn’t cute.
If you’re a bit chunky, wear trousers and shirts in the same colour and depth of colour – charcoal trousers and shirt, or dark blue shirt and navy trousers. If you have to wear white shirts to work, choose a pale tie rather than a dark one, and a dark belt that is the exact depth of colour as your trousers – you want to draw the eye away from your waist (or where your waist should be) and anything that divides you in two horizontally highlights your waist, while a dark tie acts like an arrow, pointing down to where you are widest.
Make sure your clothes fit – polo-shirts can look tailored if the shoulder seam is on the shoulder and the neck doesn’t gape, but if the shoulders creep down your arms, or the neck on your shirt strains or bags, it looks like you got dressed in the dark in somebody else’s clothing.
One of the commonest and saddest sights of summer is the older person, male or female, who seems to have lost the plot, clothing-wise. They come in two main forms:
The giver-up – this is a person who’s lost track of clothing nuances and just gone for comfort. From the sandals (worn with thick white socks) through to the jogging pants and the saggy, baggy cotton top, they look as if they dressed in the dark, from a charity shop reject bag.
The trendy is the opposite – they’ve bought the most fashionable clothes they can find, suitable or not, and they appear in back to front baseball caps, brand trainers, low-slung jeans and a high-end label T-shirt, often bearing a message they don’t understand and wouldn’t appreciate if they did!
So how can an older person dress both comfortably and attractively in summer casual clothing?
First – pick a style. If you’re going for casual, make sure that everything you’re wearing is clean and neat and roughly colour co-ordinating: that means you don’t wear blue, purple, pink and green with a red baseball cap because it all ‘looks cheerful’ – take a hint from fashion magazines and TV adverts: there are colours that are in and those that are out, try to stick to the ones that are in.
Second – make sure your clothing fits. Our shape changes as we age and men with belts around their chests and women with boobs that hang to their waists just look awful. Good undergarments help keep everything in place, but double-check, before you leave home, that your waistline is roughly round your waist – low-slung trousers and midriff exposing tops are definitely best left to the teens and twenties.
Third – keep it simple. T-shirts and polo-shirts are classic in style and shape and never look either horribly old-fashioned or ridiculously up to date.
Stick to these simple rules and you’ll always look smart, attractive and intelligently dressed, even if you’re wearing casual clothing.
There’s no doubt we wear cotton because we love it, from our favourite old much-washed T-shirt that we wear to chill on Sunday mornings, to the brand new crisp white shirt that we buy for an interview, through to the coolest new hoody to impress our mates at the weekend.
And the best thing about our cotton clothing is how easy it is to look after. We shove it in the washing machine and then in the dryer and time and again it comes out looking great. Our T-shirt is snuggly, our white shirt is pristine and our cool hoody looks as good as new.
There are ways to keep cotton clothing looking fantastic – the good news is that most colours don’t fade even after repeated washings, although the very darkest colours used in T-shirts, such as black, navy and very deep browns and greens may lose some of their ‘edge’ over time. To keep deep colours looking great, wash the clothing inside out, try not to use very strong detergents and avoid tumble-dryers. It’s also a good idea with lighter weight cottons to only partially machine dry – if you want your clothing smooth and ready-to-wear, take it out of the clothing while it’s still a little damp, smooth it out and hang it on the line – finish the wash by air drying gives clothes that extra smoothness.
Cotton usually becomes more comfortable the more we wear it, and to preserve its softness, you can also wash your cottons with a couple of drops of white vinegar in the final rinse, which makes the fibres more fluffy. And if you get oil or grease on your beloved polo-shirt or sweatshirt, don’t panic. Simply pour undiluted washing up liquid on the grease spot, making sure it goes over the edges of the grease mark and leave for ten minutes to soak in before washing.
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