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The recent burst of telecommuting is damaging fashion sense, according to a number of fashion pundits. They blame the ability to work from home for the way that both men and women have been letting their clothing standards drop.
Some supermarkets have taken to banning customers in pyjamas from shopping because it can offend. They claim that it’s because customers have got used to shopping online in their pjs and now expect to be able to do the same in person.
It’s just one sign that business-casual is devolving into ‘anything goes’ but for those who hope to travel up the career ladder it’s a dangerous path. Companies have taken complex dress codes and turned them into ‘use your best judgement’ but for savvy employees, owning a good pair of trousers or a skirt, a smart shirt and a decent pair of shoes is still the minimum requirement. If your CEO suddenly turns up in your home town and the company want you to drop off some papers or take him or her a memory stick, then you need to look right. And for those who work in ‘back offices’ it may be tempting to wear shorts, flip-flops and casual teeshirts but if you tend to look sloppy and unprofessional, you may fail to win promotion.
Find a middle path by wearing polo-shirts instead of T-shirts, lightweight casual trousers instead of shorts and simple pumps or even this year’s fashion winner, high-top trainers, instead of flip-flops.
Even the most gormless person can manage to fold a T-shirt, although the fashion-conscious have leaned the triple fold rather than the half fold, to make a T-shirt look better when you take it out and wear it. But packing a polo-shirt can present a little more difficult because of the collar. Here’s a simple guide to the triple fold and the polo pack too.
Triple fold
• Lay your T-shirt with the front down, on a flat surface
• Fold one shoulder in until it reaches one third across the shirt, turn the sleeve back so it lays across the fold – your shirt should now be two thirds as wide as it was before and the sleeve should have its open end facing out, not facing into the body of the T-shirt. This is especially important for long-sleeved T-shirts
• Fold the other shoulder and sleeve the same way. Your shirt should now be one third as wide as when laid out flat
• Lift the bottom of the T-shirt until it reaches the neck, persevering the two folds you’ve already made.
• Pick up and turn over. Perfect triple fold achieved!
Polo fold
• Button the collar of your polo and pull the collar so it’s folded down neatly before putting the polo-shirt face down on a flat surface
• Grip the shoulder seam in one hand and with the other take the corresponding sleeve and fold it into the middle of the shirt so that the fold makes a perpendicular line from the shoulder seam to the bottom of the shirt. Fold the shirt sleeve in half
• Repeat with the other side of the polo shirt. Smooth out wrinkles as you fold
• Take hold of the bottom right and left sides of the folded shirt. Bring the bottom edge of the shirt up to the bottom of the sleeves. This divides the shirt into thirds.
• Bring the folded edge to the top edge of the collar. Turn the shirt over and put in your suitcase
• To preserve polo-shirt collar shape, you can tuck other items such as clean socks, underwear or swimming togs into the neckline to hold the neck it its rounded shape.
There are three or four classic summer items that look great if worn properly and terrible if not:
- The white polo shirt – you can wear this under a blazer or linen jacket or much more simply with shorts. It’s a colour that can be worn by men and women and it looks fine on a hot day in the office as well as being suitable for a day on the beach or an evening barbecue. To look after it properly, apply sun lotion and deodorant at least an hour before putting it on so that you don’t get rings and stains from the chemicals in those vital summer toiletries.
- The linen jacket – the unstructured jacket is a summer favourite. It’s cool and light and can be crumpled. It looks good with most things but is at its best with beige or cream trousers or a summer skirt and not so great with jeans, because the difference in weight between the fabrics can make the jacket look skimpy.
- Shorts – wearing summer shorts is an art form and making the right choice can be vital. Capri pants are better for women who have thick ankles and for men with a beer belly, drawstring shorts that reach the knee are much more flattering than elasticated waist shorts that only come to mid thigh. Both sexes tend to look good in cargo shorts, especially in the summer colours: cream, beige, light blue. All shorts look terrible with formal tops like a collared shirt, a structured jacket or a silky top just create a horrible mish-mash of styles that offend the eye. Keep to casual clothing like polo-shirts or summer T-shirts to give your shorts the laid-back vibe.
British men seem to have a massive genetic blind spot when it comes to summer clothing – as soon as the UV rays reach our shores, they emerge in strange straw hats, sandals with socks and hideously bright and vulgar shirts.
A World Cup makes the situation even worse, as it adds the tendency to wear V-necked tops in neon-bright shades with huge square numbers printed on them.
There are a few tricks men can use to ensure that they look good, rather than gaudy, in the sunshine:
1. Stick to wearing just three colours. If your polo-shirt or Hawaiian shirt contains three colours, you should make sure everything else you wear is in one of those three. Bright colours look fantastic – but only if you limit them: throwing loads of bright colours together is just eye-watering, not eye-pleasing.
2. When wearing a V-neck, think about getting a chest wax first. Seriously.
3. Chose a base colour like white, blue or beige and stick to it. Buy shorts, socks, trainers, sun-hats and summer jackets in that one colour – this ensures that about 70% of your summer wardrobe is instantly well coordinated.
4. Look at clothing online and when buying a T-shirt, make sure you have a pair of trousers or shorts that are similar to the ones the model is wearing: photographers have a pretty good idea what looks good and will put models in classic styling. If you wear something pretty close to what the model is wearing, you’ll look pretty good.
There’s a vast reproduction of Vincent van Gogh’s famous self-portrait on show outside the Marunouchi Building next to Tokyo Station in Japan. The reproduction is actually a mosaic, ten metres square, made out of more than 2,000 polo shirts. 24 different shades of polo-shirt have been carefully placed to mimic the delicate graduated tones that feature in the original painting. The artwork is designed to encourage people to think about using subtle colours (like those of paintings) in clothing, and has been created by clothing designer Onward Kashiyama Co.
So subtle colours and gentle matching of shades are likely to feature on the catwalks of the next few years, as fashion falls in love with muted shades again. To make this look work for you, invest in one subtle colour choice, such as the chino shade shown in the picture, and match it with a range of off-whites, creams, beiges, fawns and chocolate shades.
Once you get comfortable with the process of colour graduation, you can start using complementary colours – a soft blue T-shirt under a chino coloured polo-shirt, or a pale green vest with grey shorts, to expand the palette of your personal clothing. You can even use the graduated colour approach to integrate your current clothing with the new look – if you have a pair of black trousers, match them with a smart grey shirt, perhaps with a slate or cream T-shirt underneath, a white scarf and a charcoal casual jacket.
You might not even know what a mirdle is, but Marks & Spencer has just launched a super-strength one. It’s a girdle. For men. It doesn’t look like a girdle, it looks like a T-shirt but it’s designed to pull you in, straighten you out and make you look ‘sleek and streamlined’.
So whether you call it ‘shapewear’ or ‘control clothing’ or go with the new word, ‘mirdle’, you may be thinking it’s a magic answer. But it’s not. While the top strength version, which looks something like a classic vest, claims it will slim 1.5 inches off the biggest abdomen, there’s still a couple of issues. What do you look like when you take it off, and how easy is it to spot a mirdle?
Well, everything does tend to hang out when the mirdle is removed and you can have some pretty unattractive compression marks too. As for recognising a mirdle when you see it, women are brilliant at this and as the range of designs is limited, most savvy ladies will spot a mirdle a mile away. Do you really want to be advertising the fact that you’re a bit paunchy?
It’s a better idea to dress cleverly to slim your figure without compressing it. In summer a black vest under a blue or grey short-sleeved shirt gives the impression of a V-shaped torso, For winter, wearing a well fitting pair of trousers with a generously-cut sweatshirt and a scarf that dangles down, cutting the width of your body in two looks substantial rather than chunky
Women often feel that they are disadvantaged in the workplace: if they dress dowdily they are overlooked for promotion or interesting tasks, but if they dress attractively they earn envy and resentment and may be taken less seriously!
If it seems that you can’t win, there is a simple solution that helps you stand out, without putting you at risk of being considered either frivolous or tarty. The answer is to combine your wardrobe to hit two different targets in each outfit.
This means everything you wear should be meet one of these three aims.
• Combine bright colours and neutral ones
• Mix floral prints with geometric ones
• Always balance any feminine touches (such as frills) with and masculine details such as tailoring and fitted clothing.
How do you do it? Well if you wear a white or blue plain work shirt, for example, you can team it with a flounce-hemmed skirt as that’s a nice mixture of feminine and masculine.
Chosen a pair of formal black trousers? Why not match them with a red or yellow jacket that has a contrast trim or a bright detail to meet the bright/neutral colour target?
If your bag is ‘girly’ or pretty, carry a formal black leather wallet to balance it out.
And if you’ve got a striped or contrast trim polo shirt, why not pair it with a floral patterned skirt to achieve the floral/geometric balance?
While this way of dressing takes a little bit of getting used to, it produces the right effect by allowing you to dress so that you stand out from the crowd, without being pigeonholed in a way that doesn’t further your career.
For the first time in five years, what you wear might be influencing the way people think about you politically. Nick Clegg’s sudden popularity boost may be welcome to the Lib Dems, but, as ever, the political commentary has been at least partly about the colour of the tie each candidate was wearing.
Politicians complain about this frivolousness, but the colour of each political party is an important part of political identity.
• Red has been the colour of the Labour Party since its inception in 1900 because it reflects the radicals of the French Revolution.
• Traditionally, the Tory party used all three colours of the Union Jack: red, blue and white, but when Labour came along and annexed red, it settled for blue alone, which is the colour many Conservative groupings worldwide have also chosen.
• The Liberal Dems seem to be going for gold this time around, although in the past they’ve chosen the brighter shade of orange, both of which hark back Liberal Party from which the new Lib Dems have developed.
• And then there’s the party named after a colour – the Green Party which links its cause to the environment by choosing a colour as its title.
So if you are seen around the workplace in a red tie, people will subconsciously assume you’re a Labour supporter, while your smart blue work shirts suddenly carry an unexpected freight of Tory hinterland. The green spring-like T-shirt that you bought a few weeks ago is no longer ‘Shrek-like’ but suggests environmental associations and your Dad’s favourite shorts in canary yellow are likely to be viewed as his emergence as a nascent Cleggite. If you want to be politically neutral until after 6 May, stick to grey, black and white – grey trousers and a black shirt or jeans and a white hoodie will keep you free of party affiliations.
Polo-shirts are popular and comfortable and most people, men in particular, are very happy to wear them, but how do you make a polo-shirt work if you’re going from daytime wear to an evening out?
First, remember that a polo-shirt is unlike a T-shirt because it has a collar. The lack of a collar is one reason that utilitarian T-shirts are often classed as work-wear, rather than smart clothing.
Polo shirts are also more flexible in the way they can be worn from workplace, to dinner, and on to a night out. The weave of a polo-shirt is designed to keep the wearer cool and the collar can be turned up to prevent sunburn – this is often derided if you do it when the sun goes down though, so don’t ‘pop’ your collar unless you are actually working outside in the day.
To dress up a polo shirt from day to evening, choose a shirt in a muted colour such as grey, navy, black or beige and then, for the evening, add a multi-coloured belt or one that’s got detailing such as studs or an intricate buckle that adds interest to your overall appearance.
Wear something as casual as a polo with a formal or semi formal jacket made from linen or wool. A smart shirt can be worn with a more casual jacket or fleece but if you combine casual with casual the appearance can be two laid-back to satisfy restaurants or night clubs.
It’s becoming more difficult to find a job, so here are three top tips on how to survive the world of work:
Pen and paper, not mobile
Write down the names of people you meet and tasks you are given. Nobody will expect you to remember everything. But don’t use your mobile or laptop to check your email or surf the web, or even to store the names and numbers of your new colleagues – many companies worry about the way staff use the web now and looking like a net surfer in your first week can suggest you are not serious about your new job. Leave your phone and laptop in your bag and only use them when you are out of the office at lunchtime.
Dress Code
Remember what you wore for interview? Make sure you have enough clothes to dress similarly for your first week of work – this should be smart trousers with a short or long-sleeved shirt for men, and a skirt and shirt for women. On Friday a lot of people may dress down into polo-shirts or T-shirts but don’t assume that dressing down is your right – it’s better to ensure that you are over rather than underdressed in that first week, and also, over-dressing allows you to be dressed formally enough to cope with anything that’s thrown at you. It’s quite common for companies to take on new staff in weeks when the senior managers are all on leave or at conferences and that can mean that everybody relaxes their dress code. Come Monday, you might be the only person who is casually dressed and the returning bosses will not be happy!
Scent
Remember to avoid wearing perfume, aftershave, or body sprays that might affect others – in your first week you’ll probably have other people hovering over you a lot of the time, checking how you’re doing, and if your scent irritates them, you’ll soon be an unpopular colleague.
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