Why yes, you do look like a ho.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
121

I’m over 50, with a tummy and not much behind any more (except in the wrong places). But in the last few years I have started wearing NY & Co slacks, and absolutely love them. They sit right at or maybe 1/2" below my waist so they don’t reveal any underthings, they’re inexpensive but made from enough different fabrics that they don’t look too casual, they’re almost too long even for me, which is amazing since most of my height is in my legs.

But the key to all well-fitting clothes is: Tailoring! Tailoring, ladies! That doesn’t have to mean paying some lah-di-dah expensive place to custom-fit hand-made clothing; it can mean buying pants big enough for your hips/thighs/behind and taking them in elsewhere! In my case, I just trot out my sewing machine when something doesn’t fit and take in a bit here and there – it’s much easier most of the time to take in than let out – and all it costs me is the price of thread. You can buy a $20 pair of NY & Co slacks and have them tailored to fit your waist/ass/thighs for $10 and they’ll look terrific! I follow Stacy & Clinton’s dictum (of What Not To Wear) of fitting the biggest part of you, so if those pants are too tight? Go up a size and tailor down!

A few years ago whiterabbit needed a nice pair of black slacks. Besides being ultra-short, she also doesn’t have much of a waist. So we bought pants to fit her biggest part, her middle, and they swam on the rest of her – till we got them home. I took in the hips, hemmed the bottoms, and shortened the rise slightly, and for half an hour’s work, she had pants that made her look like she had an ass for the first time in her life. And I’ve had no training in tailoring – it’s really easy to do, promise!

Another good source for basic, decent-quality stuff is Land’s End. Granted, it’s conservatively styled, but they also do a fair amount of tailoring at little or no charge. It’s a good source for basics, although their offerings tend to be seasonal – right now they’re offering mostly summer casual slacks and capris which mostly don’t work well for the office, but during the winter they offer a nice assortment of dressier wools and cords and such.

122

Oh dear. Besides Dockers and the Gap, Lee Casuals are pretty flattering too, especially if you’re a little hippy. Even White Stag has some decent non-elastic waist women’s slacks. You’re too young to give up! :stuck_out_tongue:

123

Sorry, I must be realllly slow today. Could someone explain? :confused:

124

His pants are so tight you can see that he’s circumsised and thus probably Jewish, hence the greeting.

125

That reminded me of a (now) funny incident. Back in my 20s, I was the assistant to a plant manager, and we were quite laid-back. I could wear whatever I wished, mostly jeans and T-shirts. One day, I woke late and scrambled to get dressed and be at work on time.

I was talking to boss in his office, when he tilted his head, looked puzzled, and said, “Why am I seeing smiley faces?”

Oops, that would be because I was wearing a Joe Boxer bra with smiley faces all over it, under a lightweight white T-shirt. After we stopped laughing about it, I told him to stop staring at my chest, and he told me to stop wearing smiley faces on it. :slight_smile:

126

They don’t sell online, by any chance? I’m a combination of you (over 50, tummy, no bum) and whiterabbit (shortish, no waist) and I’ve just about given up finding pants to fit.

It’s weird than I can buy, sight unseen, from Lands’ End and have them fit well but can’t buy a decent pair of trousers in any shop near where I live.

127

I have 2 cow orkers in their mid-40s who dress like club hos half their age - miniskirts or skintight jeans, lace tops, stripper heels, the whole 9 yards. They made the mistake of dressing in their usual manner on the day some people from the central office in Sacramento came to our office. My boss later said that the people from the state mentioned, without naming names, “some people” who “we couldn’t tell if they were on their way to a nightclub or coming back from one.” The two offenders have toned it down since then, but not by much.

128

I saw that episode! (Or one just like it.) The woman getting straightened out had a heeeeeeyuge chest and regular sized rest of her body since she had lost weight (she was an excellent candidate for breast reduction - those were serious melons there), and hated the idea of having to still shop in plus sized shops, in spite of the fact that there was nothing that could fit a chest like that in normal sized shops. I tailor my clothes a little, but it never occurred to me to tailor as much as they suggested. Brilliant!

Why do we have to have dress codes/monitor what other people wear at work? For the same reason we have to bathe and brush our teeth - some things we do affect other people. Hey, it’s nice out now - why wear clothes at all? Because we are living in a society, and society has rules. They might not be great rules, or fair rules, but they do exist, and if you want to get along in society, you will do well to be aware of them if not follow them.

129

“Proper” business attire is like good table manners. You aren’t doing it for your own sake (a lot of table manners are fiddly and annoying), you’re doing it to show respect for your dining companion(s).

“Proper” business attire is very similar. You do it to demonstrate that your recognize and respect the rules, expectations, and conventions of your industry and you do it to demonstrate a level of respect for your co-workers and clientele. If I meet with my financial advisor, I would hope he presents himself well because it shows he respects me enough to make a basic effort to meet my expectations. If a guy shows up in the board room with bed-head, wearing flip-flops and a t-shirt, then obviously he doesn’t think that I’m worthy of much effort. Fine, he may be more comfortable in that outfit and able to do the job, but his appearance lacks grace.

Companies put a lot of effort into their corporate image. From trademarks to genreal professional appearance. If you want to look like a gang member on your own time, then that’s fine, but depending on your industry, that may not fit the corporate image they are trying to cultivate for their clients and in the office you should follow office rules.

If I’m handing over a my million-dollar investment portfolio to the control of a financial advisor at an investment banking firm, I’d feel a lot more comfortable handing it over to the guy in a suit and tie, who fits the corporate image endorsed by the bank: clean-cut, dependable, and professional.

I’d be a lot less inlcined to hand my portfolio over to a guy with a mohawk, who looks like he was recently released from prison and who has a visible gang tattoo on his arm. Sure he may have graduated from Yale and be perfectly capable of doing the job, but he has chosen attire whose attributes harken to “ex-con”. His outfit flies in the face of his office’s rules and the conventions of his industry. That may put his work ethic into question: his choices in attire demonstrate that he can’t be bothered to follow office rules and meet his clients’ expectations, can I expect his fiancial choices to be good for my investment portflio?

Yes, that’s biased and “wrong”. It’s a prejudiced opinion. But wearing “appropriate attire” demonstrates that he knows what is apporpriate for his industry and inspires confidence.

In the same way, if I saw a mechanic wearing a suit and tie while fiddling under the hood of my car, I’d wonder if he knew what the hell he was doing. His tie could get caught in the engine: that’s unsafe and lacks common sense. His $75 dollar shirt is being ruined by grease: why doesn’t he worry about the cost? Etc. I’d want the scruffy guy in greasy coveralls because he looks like he knows what he’s doing.

130

More often “B”. Sandals are translated as 99 cent rubber flip flops. Khakis are translated as grubby once-were-kinda-olive-green-but-are-now-an-odd-shade-of-grey pants with frayed hems. Polo shirts are translated as anything with a collar no matter HOW beat up it is.

As far as “A”, generally it’s skirt length. Our official policy is skirts have to be at least 2" longer than your longest finger when your hands are held at your sides. We sometimes have a LOT of short-armed women in our office :smiley:

VCNJ~

131

Always nice to see the dress code nazis working themselves into a hissy fit over what them shameless hussies wear. “Where is her burka? Where is her hijab? Has she no idea what is seemly and proper?”

If you could hear yourselves with my ears, you’d be DEEPLY embarrassed.

132

Funny, no one here has said that. Nary a mention of such garments as you mention has been made but by you.

133

There is a time, and a place for everything, even garments. The garments I have seen mentioned here aren’t appropriate to wear to the the kinds of workplaces mentioned. If you are a housepainter, wearing clean, but stained t-shirt and pants is acceptable. If you are a stripper, then skimpy form fitting clothes is the correct mode of dress. Frayed, ancient pants is not the proper thing to wear to an office that has customers coming in and out of it. (Unless perhaps you work at the vet’s office cleaning cages or the like.) Until the day when grass skirts and no tops is socially acceptable in the nations the varied posters are from, or skirts that reveal naked, pink tacos, not to mention pants that are so loose and low slung that pubes and penis are visible, that is how it will be.

134

I’m

a) European,
b) a techie,
c) often working in factories or similar places where you don’t run into “clients” in the usual sense.

The biggest problems I’ve had related to inappropiate clothing were unsafe clothing (that engineer who wore miniskirts and flip-flops in the production area) and consultants who insist in wearing three-piece suits to a factory because they’re used to working with banks. When your customer is a guy in blue overalls, a three-piece is just wrong.

135

Nava also brings up a very pertinent point, safety. Also, of course, letting the clothes relate to the customer base.

136

Yup. I buy some skirts & tops there, but the pants aren’t nice enough to bother getting hemmed, since they won’t last. Their junior’s stuff is the right length for me (skirts, anyway), but it’s not appropriate for work.

I stick to Ann Taylor Loft & Banana Republic for pants - they carry petites that are actually a good length for me. It’s on the expensive side for my budget, but at least they’ll last awhile.

137

When I worked for the state:

All shirts had to be tucked in (bad news for women, especially plus sized women, as many modern fashions are for untucked blouses. I never followed this rule. Nobody ever bugged me).

No sandals or open toed shoes. This was somewhat relaxed since we were in Texas, but if you were wearing anything of the sort, you had to wear pantyhose. This led to some curiosity on behalf of the men we had working there. :smiley: No shoes were to be worn without socks.

Women were encouraged to wear skirts. These had to be no shorter than knee length, preferably 2 inches below. I guess that’s not too unreasonable. Shorts of all kinds were naturally verboten.

No blue jeans. Ever. Ever ever ever. Or black jeans. No denim was allowed within those walls, not even in jacket form.

All pants were to have belts.

It was an office building. There was no chance – NO chance – of a customer walking in. The room had to be utterly silent, too. If you had a question to ask your supervisor (and you could never, never, never use your own best judgment; you had to rely on the rather shaky judgment of the people above you, people who had not gone through the same training and often knew less than the people they supervised) you silently raised your hand and waited to be noticed. God forbid you were under quota, too. The fact that you had to sit like a little kid in kindergarten waiting for teacher to call on you made no difference in the time you were expected to take on a particular case.

Yeah, I left after a couple months.

138

That reminds me of a plant I worked in. This was a recycling plant - they took old newspaper and made boxes and new newspaper. The plant - which I had to go into from time to time was wet, smelly, moldy, loud, full of large equipment and - although I never saw any - apparently slightly rat infested (not a surprise given the large piles of paper waiting for processing.

Their dress code for office employees - no jeans, not ever. They had “casual Fridays” but since the office was fairly casual Monday - Thursday (as in khakis and polo shirts) casual Fridays was meaningless. Since the dress code also meant that anyone going back into the plant had to wear flat rubber soled shoes (for safety), and relatively tight fitting clothes (no jackets or blazers that might get caught in equipment), it was the silliest dress code I’ve come across. But it was what it was and they were paying me to show up every day.

139

I have got to ask, what state and what department??

What if you needed to use the rest rooom? Did you have to raise your hand silently and wait and hold it in? :eek:

140

True, but that’s because to do so I’d have to be inside your head, which is not a place I want to be.

Enjoy,
Steven