Okay, I confess. As if you didn’t already know this, I confess to being a clothes-aholic. Being properly dressed has been an obsession of mine since seventh grade, when I found myself at a new school, among strangers, with no acceptable clothes and no means to buy any. I’m talking from the skin out. The other girls were wearing training bras, for cat’s sake. I wore these little cotton undershirts. The horror.
Anyway, the burning humiliation of that year is still with me, and as a result I’m always looking for the perfect outfit, that combination of garments that will cause my enemies to faint with envy and my friends to understand that all is well with me. As a result I am a sucker for fashion magazines, clothing ads, shoe ads, and books by people who promise to tell you how to dress with elegance and style. Of the latter I have three or four board feet in my library.
So today when an email appeared in the inbox entitled “How to Dress for Your Dream Job” I had to pop it open and read it, even though I’m not really looking for a dream job right now, or maybe I’m doing my dream job, if only it would pay something. The email was from Project Gravitas, a clothing company that makes, as far as I can figure out, black clothes with built-in girdles.
Sure, I’m tempted. Who wouldn’t want to go to New York City and slink up and down the streets looking like a tubby trial lawyer in a girdle? But that isn’t my life right now. Sitting around the house writing in a black dress with a built-in girdle would grow uncomfortable in a couple of hours. Then I would have to peel it off and throw it in the corner along with yesterday’s bra.
The truth is that before we figure out how to dress for our dream jobs we have to figure out what our dream jobs actually are. Writers need one serious outfit to wear to town, so impeccable that agents, editors, and publicists will faint with respect and fear, another to wear to conventions, so charming and approachable that readers will seek our company and beg to buy our books, and yet another to sit around in all day like the shlubs we really are. Pajamas are good. These are from BedHead.
But maybe your ambitions are a little more grandiose. Here’s a dress fit for a queen, Elizabeth’s coronation dress in fact. Maybe if you wear it they’ll give you a job like that.
Kate Gallison, Writer 