How to dress professionally for different occasions

Dressing professionally is a part of corporate lifestyle, which you have to adopt even if you are not keen to dress formally in your routine life. You can spend hours and hours in advocating casual dressing as an attribute of being yourself, but the fact remains that your appearance does matter and your attire plays an important role in your overall appearance. If nothing else, it shows how enthusiastic you are about the job; a casual or sporty dress can represent you as someone who doesn’t take his/her job seriously. Needless to say, such flippancy means no job (if you are dressed up badly in an interview), or no promotion (if you don’t get dressed professionally in the workplace). Call it the narrow-mindedness or unfairness of the people, but this is the corporate world for you.

Have you not heard the phrase “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”? Similarly, corporate life has its own culture and you need to acclimatize with it. Let’s have a look at some suggestions on how to get dressed for different business occasions.

Getting dressed for Interviews:

Whether you should wear a suit for the interview or not, depends on the job you will be interviewed for, however in many cases it is the safest and the least fussy option available. However, a clean, long sleeved shirt with black or navy pants can also do the job. Do not try to give a youthful impression by dressing overly casual, as it’s not going to impress the interviewer in most situations. You can skip the tie, if you think being too formal is unnecessary. Avoid jeans, collarless shirts or sneakers for the interview, same rules apply to both interviewer and the interviewee.


Office or workplace:

Once you have got the job, you can easily ask about (or just observe) the dress code at workplace and follow that. However, being a greenhorn you should be a little more careful than those senior ones. If you see them wearing casual stuff, doesn’t mean you have got the license to put on street wear on next weekend.

Business meetings:
There are various types of business meetings, for example a meeting within your workplace; or you may be meeting with a client in their office or at a restaurant; then there are those events when people are looking to network with potential clients or partners. All of these business meeting require different attires, such as formal, informal, semi formal or casual (for events like business cocktail parties).