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Careful additions can transform office clothes to evening wear

November 13th, 2011 Leave a comment Go to comments

“You have to meet people after work for a drink or you have to meet them for business purposes or you make calls after office hours,” said Haizlip. But when it comes to clothes, corporate chic can be social disaster after 5 p.m., and coming to work overdressed is overkill.

Day-to-night transformation doesn’t take Clark Kent and a nearby phone booth to achieve. With a little careful addition and subtraction, businesswomen can easily step out of the office and into a night on the town without a trip home to change clothes.

“If it’s not too terribly dressy, usually a good business suit or a good skirt-and-sweater combination will do,” Haizlip said. With a little doctoring, that is.

“What you can do is take off the coat (and wear only a dressy blouse and the suit skirt), or put on a sweater and a pretty scarf and a low-slung belt. Without the jacket, it makes it look a lot more dressy. I usually add some jewelry, some larger earrings or a necklace that would co-ordinate with the belt.”

The objective: to look and feel different in the evening – less confined and more relaxed – than you did all day. The tactic: Know the event and accessorize accordingly.

“How you feel reflects how you look,” said wardrobe consultant Angelique “Angie” Lindsley. “If you feel like you just walked out of a briefcase, you’re going to look like you just walked out of a briefcase.”

The lines between work clothes and dress clothes are blurring. With more women in the workplace, work clothes are getting dressier, more fashionable, and turning up in places where frills and femininity once reigned.

Lawyer Renee E. Castle often must go straight from the office to political events, fund-raisers or bar association functions.

When she knows there will be no time to change, she wears a suit to work with a silk instead of a cotton blouse or a simple silk dress with a jacket over it.

Without the jacket, both looks take on evening appeal.

“You don’t feel so funny wearing a suit anymore. I’ve noticed that now women wear suits and more tailored clothes to church and places you wouldn’t expect it,” Castle said. “If you have time, it’s kind of fun sometimes to get out of your work clothes and change shoes, but it’s certainly not necessary.”

For Kim Cherry, a public relations representative, planning is the key to looking good at the office and elsewhere.

“One thing I will do if I know I have something after work, I’ll plan ahead and wear something that would be especially comfortable and versatile – a knit dress or something that’s not too confining,” she said.

Her public relations job does not come with a pin-striped dress code.

“If it was something real fancy, I think I would try to make time to go home and change,” she said. “The things you wear to work generally would be acceptable for anything but the most formal occasions.”

Invitations to formal occasions like weddings, rehearsal dinners or fancy cocktail or supper parties usually would come with enough advance notice to plan on bringing a change of clothes.

It’s not uncommon or unprofessional to head for the bathroom after hours and emerge a slightly different version of how you went in, or to dash out to the car and grab a whole new look for parties too fancy to attend in a renovated business suit.

Lawyer Jan Esposito said she learned the art of double-duty dressing through trial and error. “I don’t know if I do it right, but I do it all the time,” said Esposito.

Her technique combines a good basic suit plus accessories that fit in her briefcase and an extra makeup kit she keeps at the office.

“I’ll add a gold belt and stick that in my briefcase, leave off the blazer and have a silk blouse with this belt and more jewelry,” she said.

She’ll touch up her makeup and may pull on a pair of colored or patterned hose. “I think accessories are the key,” she said. Change the accessories and change the look.

“I think one of the reasons I don’t go in for two sets of clothes is for economy and value,” Esposito said. “You can get much better quality and constructed clothes and concentrate on that with your wardrobe.” Buy a few very well-constructed suits and learn to use them.

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  1. December 19th, 2011 at 00:24 | #1
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