Day in the Life: Getting Dressed

[One of the occasional series of posts about my typical day.]

One of the great things about working in software is the dress code.  Most of my (male) coworkers wear jeans with tshirts or polos.  “Dressy” for them is a buttondown shirt.  Slacks and sweaters fits in fine.  If I’m meeting with clients I may wear a skirt, add a “serious” pendant or pin, a cardigan or jacket – but usually I can focus on comfort and practicality.

What do I mean by practicality?  Well, here’s an example: I mostly wear all-black walking shoes, from New Balance or Brooks.  I also like Thorlo’s black walking socks.  So I buy 6 identical pairs of socks at a time. If one or two socks gets lost I can just mate the remainders. That’s practical.   Also practical is that most of my clothes are separates, for easy mixing and matching.

My size and shape dictates a lot of my choices too. My belly bulk means that my waist size while standing is significantly smaller than my waist size while sitting, so I mostly wear elastic-waisted pants.  The boobs of doom* have their own requirements (of the well-engineered underwire-supported hoist-and-separate variety).  I also tend to insist on comfortable, supportive shoes, but I’m vain enough to not wear athletic shoes with skirts.  So while I do have a nice pair of Aravon dress shoes, my default is pants.  Lately I’ve also been more concerned about avoiding sunburn, so I’ve been wearing more long sleeves.

Most days I wear a cotton knit top & pants. In cooler weather I wear a sweater and/or leggings under my pants, or cords. In warmer weather I wear more skirts, shorts, and cool tops.  For in-between weather, like now, I wear more layers and my reversible fleece/nylon coat.

I don’t go for the “slimming” tricks of wearing all black or long lines, per se.  I look good in red, purple, blue & green — although not necessarily all at once :)  V-necks do look good on me, but so do turtlenecks.  Black and white goes with everything, and I do wear black most days – I have 4 pairs of black pants – but that’s mostly for ease of matching.

I spent years wearing only gold or silver jewelry, since it would go with most everything, but in the past few years I’ve built a collection of jewelry with different colored stones (amethyst, garnet, blue topaz, malachite, tourmaline…) for accessorizing too.

*So named by the man of the house.