In a Recession, Dress Up To Cheer Up

There are two further advantages to dressing formally for work. First, it means that you always know what to wear. Those stressful daily questions— tie or no tie? Khakis or dress pants?—are answered simply. Even better, dressing up means a sharper demarcation between work and the rest of your life: a tie means no slopping around doing nothing.

Yet the biggest joy about saying goodbye to casual is that we say goodbye to some of the cruddy thinking that went with it. The most pathetic was the idea that dressing casually helped you to be creative. I have been watching the television series, Mad Men, and am gratified to see that the creatives in a Madison Avenue advertising agency in the 1960s did not let their stiffly starched collars and perfect tailoring prevent them from dreaming up good ads.

To survive this recession, we need to smarten up and buckle down. We need some belts and braces. We need to pull ourselves up with our own bootstraps. We need to get some work under our belts. So get up and out there, job or no job, every day, dressed smart and ready for work and pull your socks up to whatever length they happen to be.

Meg Dunn is the creative director for Philadelphia-based apparel supplier Executive Apparel. Executive Apparel specializes in work uniforms and formal apparel for the promotional products industry, and has been best known for their blazers. Executive Apparel has been in business for over 76 years.

For more information visit www.executiveapparel.com or write meg@executiveapparel.com.