Office Dressing Skills

　　 When my friend Steve Cooper moved from England to Silicon Valley in 1999, he was very happy to have all of them. Suit and necktie They stayed on the other side of the Atlantic, wearing the same Polo every day as the real California people. shirt And shorts and sandals, there is no need to change business meetings. He thought he could live so comfortably in his lifetime. Until one day, he walked into a boardroom of a big Vc firm, and found a room full of suits, including two casual partners. Only he was wearing Polo shirt, khaki shorts and sandals.

Similar embarrassing scenes have been experienced by many people, and I have. In any country, how to dress in office is a headache. We have countless opportunities to meet people for the first time. From job interviews to visiting customers, the importance of first impressions is no longer needed. Even in the office every day, personal appearance should not be neglected. If you work hard and wear sloppy clothes every day, your boss may not be willing to take you to a client or promote you to management.

My personal feeling is that most Chinese would rather dress casually than others, because we are very low-key, so it is best not to be labeled with good publicity. People who work in domestic and foreign companies and securities companies may dress formally because of the requirements of the company. But most of the leaders and senior executives in the state owned enterprises, private enterprises and government departments that I have contacted do not always like to wear a suit tie. In some social occasions, even if the formal dress code is specified, many people will dress casually. A friend of mine took part in the Alumni Association in Beijing two years ago. The invitation was written on men's suits and ladies' dresses. She spent the winter trying to dress up in an evening dress. It turned out that most people were present in jeans and casual clothes.

Americans look casual on the surface, but sometimes things get complicated. Casual casual colleagues will suddenly dress up formally, making foreigners like me and Steve at a loss.

How can I avoid embarrassment in the workplace? I asked two office etiquette experts, Gretchen Neels and Ann Marie Sabath, what the biggest secret of professional dress is, and the answer of two people is exactly the same: "don't dress for what you are doing now, dress for what you want to do." That is to say, if you want to be promoted, see how your boss and boss wear clothes.

The two experts felt that the western style enterprises' work clothes and casual clothes were in chaos, and the "business casual" dressing style that emerged from Silicon Valley in 70s and 80s of last century is to blame. Everyone should remember that Bill Gate was wearing the biggest sweater in. The latest software of Microsoft was released. YAHOO's Yang Zhiyuan wore the most common lattice shirt to demonstrate. Apple Computer's Jobs still wore black turtleneck pullovers and jeans for decades.

Over the past decade, the trend of "business and leisure" has intensified. In many companies, khaki pants and jeans are no longer reserved for casual Friday. Now that all employees are required to wear suits every day, even the law firms and some companies on Wall Street allow employees to wear casual clothes without going to court or meeting customers. A friend who works in Wall Street says his company can wear jeans every two days.

The problem is that many young people think that leisure is the way to wear college clothes to the company. My colleague, "fashion" columnist Christina Binkley wrote an article saying that young assistants in law firms only wear suits when they go to court. They usually wear anything from yoga pants to UGG snow boots. This made them grow up with their suits. Some companies believe that such casual clothes of young people lack the minimum respect for work, and begin to try to reverse this trend, and specify what can be worn and what is not.

In fact, even some restaurants and clubs in New York's old school do not accept my own definition of "business casual" style. Some places require men to wear suits and jeans and sneakers. On a Friday last summer, a friend and I decided to go to the famous Campbell apartment cocktail bar at Manhattan central station. When I got to the door, I was blocked because I wore a pair of sneakers (it rained that day). Later, I checked the website of the bar, and I really said, "no baseball cap, T-shirt and sneakers will be served." A few weeks ago, I met with a friend at Yale Club. The day before, she wrote emails to remind me: "don't wear jeans."

If you want to make fewer mistakes in this respect, you have to rely on your friends to remind you, or you can observe them and take the initiative to inquire about them. The problem is that some people simply don't know what's wrong with what they do. Office etiquette experts, Neels and MS. Sabath, are often employed by large companies and talk with foreign employees about how to better integrate into the local corporate culture. In fact, they often talk about the personnel manager as a third party. They often need to talk about their local hygiene habits with foreign employees: bathing, shaving and changing shirts every day.

Never assume that everyone understands this. A Chinese friend who worked in a financial information company in New Jersey told me that a new Chinese colleague came into office last autumn. He was gentle and courteous, but he wore a dark red sweater and a coffee striped sweater every day for 3 months. He looked very sloppy but absolutely different from the company's habit of changing clothes every day.

A Chinese colleague could not help but gently remind him that it was immediately effective. He changed to a light sweater and khaki trousers for second days, but this body wore for another 3 months. (Yuan Li)