Take a day off and bring him shopping with Sandra and you. If Mike doesn’t have an SO bring someone who would perk his interest.
My first time going shopping for suits was kind of overwhelming. Pure business suits, casual suits, casual Friday suits and everything in between. Cuts, styles and other options just added to the confusion. Plus I’m colorblind so once hues become involved…my brain went on break.
Thankfully I had 4 ladies to look me over, 2 family and 2 others, who told me what they liked and what the suits would be good for. I could use this information along with what felt good to decide what I wanted. I am confident, but there is something nice about good ladies looking at me and saying ‘Oh yeah…that’s nice’ with That Look. Yummy.
Being colorblind I would ask others to come out and shop for colors with me. If it is up to me; black, whites and grey are hard to go wrong with.
I think if I were you, I’d stick with the education aspect, and make sure that he realizes that it’s better to have a well-tailored and altered $200 suit than it is to have an ill-fitting Armani suit. One makes you look like someone who has a clue, but not necessarily money, and the other makes you look like some clown who spent thousands on a suit but didn’t have the sense to spend $150 on alterations.
Which is going to look better to a potential employer?
I grew up Hating shopping; being lugged by the arm and sitting by a wall outside while the other person spent hours trying on clothes in a dressing room.
Possibly the first time in my life that I learned to use the Death Stare was after the phrase, “lets go to the mall and go shopping…!” :dubious:
My first real boss told me the secret of men’s shopping was remembering 2 simple rules:
You get in.
You get out.
But none of the above serves me well at all when clothes shopping; I’m far too “that will do” and not enough “that looks good on me” “that’s in style” or “that’s a good price”.
To go business clothes shopping, I’d need a woman with me to keep an eye on what actually looks good on me; someone to say things like, “that suit looks great on the rack, but not on you. You’re a Winter…”
Also, I need the issues of clothing price addressed. Getting circulars of BOGO are nice, but somehow they’ve always ended just before I’ve arrived. That and the sales person will seem to imply how all those $200-$300 suits are gone…
but look how nice that $900 one looks on you. :smack:
A person who shops regularly and knows prices will know whats true vs whats BS and can easily tell the sales person, “Thanks! We’ll let you know if we need you.” which is usually only at the register.
I think this makes sense. Find a Jos A Banks or something, and bring him there. You might pay a little more for shirts (and probably a fair amount more for socks and belts) than you might at Sears or wherever, but the suits will be pretty inexpensive, and good enough. Most importantly, though, it will be much less painful than shlepping through a giant mall store and trying to patch together outfits.
With regard to shirts, make sure to pick a style or two that are “standard” for a big retailer so he can just order more if he needs them without having to go shopping. If he needs to replace a shirt or wants a new color or pattern, he can just say “I need X size in Y style from Brooks Brothers” and order it.
And why can they run buy one get two free sales all the time and still stay in business? Because the clothes should really be priced at a third of what they have listed as full price. The quality just isn’t there.
The stores look great, and the clothes look good on the rack, but he needs better wardrobe basics than that if he wants to wear them frequently.
No potential employer; he’s already got the job (wearing a suit I’ve shrunk out of. I’ve already given him a couple of those.
But I came back to talk about the education issue. I learned about buying businesswear from two women.
One was a mid-90s girlfriend; we worked in a department store, had to wear businesswear to work, and got a much-bigger-than-usual discount for same on the weekend of the first payday of each quarter. She decided at one point that I couldn’t be trusted to buy my own clothes alone and insisted on advising all my sartorial choices. At first I’d just give her the money and let her choose what she thought I needed, but then she decided to drag me along.
The other was my mother, a seamstress. She didn’t so much inform my style choices as teach me when it was best not to get certain items offered, no matter what the salesman told me.
People rarely instinctively know how to shop for work clothes. They always learn from other people. A while back, a guy I knew changed from manual labor to management and had no idea what to buy. It really did take someone (me) going to the store with him and explaining why he needed to look at seams and not just buy cheap.
I also had to tell him how to care for his new clothes. Many people don’t know that you shouldn’t mix towels with smooth fabrics, even if they are the same color.
At the risk of threatening your evil cred…I think you are a good person to take this on.
One reason Goodwill & Salvation are bad ideas is that “Sandra” (who’s gonna do the heavy lifting on this shopping trip, it has been decided in email) doesn’t have unlimited time. You can put together a good ensemble at Macy’s or Dillard’s in a fraction of the time it’ll take to do the same thing at a thrift store.
My fiance just changed jobs from retail to banking. Not full suits or jackets, but he does wear dress pants, collared long-sleeve shirts, and ties now (he’d never worn one before that wasn’t clip on). We still wear sweatpants at home, but less out in public.
We went to Kohl’s and I just followed him around. He actually turned out to have quite a good sense of style. I was there to provide guidance (especially avoiding “matchy-matchy” a couple times). But he picked all of it out.
That worked out well for us. I’d recommend going along with the guy and letting him take the lead.
Thrift shops are great if you know what you’re doing and what you’re looking for. There are good things there, but an overwhelming percentage of their stock is just dreck and if you are not a well educated consumer who can distinguish between the two, you’re not going to get well made, professional clothes at thrift shops.
There’s also an element of luck at thrift shops, while you may find Burberry on a particular visit, it’s not there at every visit while that brand (or whichever other you choose) is pretty much guaranteed to be at the department store on every visit.
For the discerning shopper with lots of time & a good tailor, thrift stores can be useful. The ones run by little local charities are better than Salvation Army or Goodwill.
For a newbie, a trip to a good “regular” retailer–accompanied by tasteful friends–is the way to go. Don’t just buy the clothes–explain why you are making the choices you do.
I was going to suggest the thrift-store route. As a habit learned from broke days past, I still get upwards of 80% of my work clothes from thrift stores. (Shirts more than pants; guys simply don’t donate pants, preferring to ride them into the ground.) I do it even though I could afford to buy new, and you would never know.
But once I read that this particular job is suit-and-tie, I have to back away from that advice. Suit pickings and secondhand stores are absolutely ghastly. :eek:
Yes, but Mike needs to know about the deals on high-quality men’s wear that can be found at Salvation Army/Goodwill. Especially on conservative ties and shirts. Taking him shopping clothes him for a day. Teaching him where the deals can be found clothes him for a lifetime.
If somebody has odd taste, and he/she is getting a new job requiring conservative, etc…clothing, condescension is the last thing that needs worrying about. Let’s be real, you’re buying a grown person clothing in *any *case, in this scenario. Don’t see how there’s a lot of room for bowing up.
ETA: BTW, ‘odd’, when used in getting/keeping a job, *is *“THAT bad”.
Far be it from me to knock thrifting (just picked up a nice semi-prof blazer and some blouses myself for less than $20 tonight) but I disagree with this entirely.
Mike doesn’t need to learn that there are ‘deals’ at thrift stores. Mike needs to learn how to dress like a professional man in business.
Introducing someone who can’t dress to the sartorial chaos of a thrift store will do nothing but create confusion and needless questions about the suitability of pants with cuffs or pleats or why a boiled-wool coat is a coat and therefore outerwear and not suitable for wearing indoors but a shaped wool jacket is business-wear and needs to be worn whenever he’s in the office. Don’t even get me started on shoes, and I shudder to think about socks.
Now, as general advice to people on a budget, sure! Hit the thrifts and consignments twice a season at least - at the beginning to snap up the scrumptious stuff that will go quick, and at the end to score even better deals on the stuff people didn’t recognize as quality. But sending someone in there who can’t be trusted to dress themselves and thinking they’ll end up with suitable Burberry or London Fog is naive.
Skald, you and your lady friend are to be commended, and I wish you both luck in passing on the basics.
