Dressing for your environment is more than dressing in work clothes for work and a swimsuit on the beach. Dressing for your environment means that you dress to fit in with the people around you, the culture and expectations.

I mean, we’ve all heard the trope that you should dress for the job that you want. That’s great, on the surface. But in practice, you don’t want to dress more than one level above the job you actually have. If you’re in the mail room, please do not dress like you have a corner office. It’s suspect (and won’t serve the work you need to get done). If you want a job as a creative, and you work in the accounting department, you honestly can’t dress like the graphics crew (or IT) – the most you can do is accessorize and hint.

Why?

Because you also have to dress for where you are, right now. I realized this the other day when I was in a class with a bunch of highly competent ladies from the richer areas of my county. Every one of them dressed for a casual Saturday class as I did when I worked in an office. Makeup and jewelry on point – grooming was just “done”. Do I need to say that there were no roots showing, no broken nails, and no leggings? Probably. It’s 2024. -sighs-

Now, I love clothes and have written books about how to dress. But I don’t dress (or groom) like that on a habitual basis. Why not? Well. One, I am a messy creative person with a big furry dog. But that’s just the surface reason. The real reason? I don’t live in a high-income area, and dressing even as I do (well chosen outfits, enthusiastic use of color, and nice fabrics) marks me as different. If I were to notch that difference up by improving the tailoring and details, I’d no longer be dressing for my environment – I’d be saying by my clothes that I belonged somewhere else.

Eccentricity (which I embrace) is one thing, but to dress like those ladies would be to change my allegiance. It would be to say, “I’m too good for here”. Certainly, as my SoCal suburb changes hands, people who can afford the absurd housing prices will replace the current residents and the dress code for “here” will also change. That’s the way of the world. But as of right now, most of my neighbors wear clothes from discount stores.

It’s an interesting quandary, living as I do in an area of the country with widely varying income standards. To appear at home in my town is to appear a bit disheveled in the next town over. And this doesn’t just cover income variances. Different areas of the country have different standards of dress as far as color choice, how quickly they embrace new fashions, etc. Being from coastal SoCal, I am, for instance, not even remotely shocked by bare skin. That’s Tuesday, and it’s not interesting.

While I will always say that you must dress in the manner that is most true to who you are, you must also dress in a way that is true to the environment in which you find yourself. You don’t dress to do your cleaning the way you dress to go to church, but you should dress in either situation exactly as yourself…. yourself doing the thing that you’re actually doing, in the station, in the place, in which you find yourself.

And when you find yourself self-limiting, be willing to look at the reasons your subconscious might have to put those limits on. Then you can choose to dress exactly as you please – and take the consequences as they come.