Reaching the age where dressing up really means dressing up

At what age or stage of life does improving your wardrobe become absolutely inescapable? I… At what age or stage of life does improving your wardrobe become absolutely inescapable? I used to think that happened at age 18. But after graduating from high school, I continued to fill my closet with jeans, sweaters and comfy-but-cute T-shirts.

Sure, there was the occasional skirt, the summer dress or the almost-a-dress shirt that only looks good over jeans. But there wasn’t anything that could be called “dressy.”

So I decided that around age 21 or 22 — the point at which I’d be officially labeled an adult — I’d have to add suits, dressy slacks and sleek overcoats to my repertoire.

Well, that time has come and gone and, not surprisingly, neither I nor many of my friends have enough dress clothes to constitute an easy outfit selection for special occasions. Only a handful of respectable articles of clothing can be found among my stacks of jeans and sweatshirts.

A few weeks ago, I had an interview. Back when I was freshly 18, I had anticipated an age-21 cutoff for wardrobe improvement and purchased an affordable black suit for just such an occasion. However, I discovered that I hadn’t a single acceptable thing to wear under it. No button-down dress shirt in anything but very casual-looking cotton. No dress shirt that wasn’t just a different shade of black (don’t mix your blacks, please), or that had a neckline that would look neat and symmetrical beneath my outerwear.

After trying on countless shirts beneath my jacket and becoming annoyed with having to repeatedly re-hang it with great care so as not to crease it, I opted for a semi-dress shirt with a boat neckline in lavender, something that had been hiding in the darkest recesses of my closet. I think I bought it when I was in middle school.

My roommate had a similar dress-up dilemma before her big Valentine’s Day date to the opera in New York City.

You see, the problem is much greater than needing dress clothes. You might have a shirt and skirt that look great together, but no shoes to match. Or maybe you have shoes, but they’re open-toed and it’s freezing outside. Or perhaps you have the shoes and the skirt but no top that matches well.

Again, it was musical outfits in my apartment until my friend finally decided that her wardrobe just wasn’t cutting it. She didn’t want to wear heels and have to be limping home after a day of walking around on the city sidewalks. She wanted to be warm and comfortable. She settled for dark jeans, ballet flats, and a black sweater — hardly an outfit up to any girl’s romantic fantasy of what a night out to the opera should be.

Really, we’re living in an age of wardrobe paradox. We’re supposed to be grown-ups now, ready to go on sophisticated dates and important interviews without having to take last-minute shopping sprees or raid our friends’ closets for a workable ensemble. But 99 percent of our time, we sit in stuffy and terribly uncomfortable classrooms or work on homework or term papers all day (or when we’re not doing something more fun that also doesn’t require dress clothes).

I’m stuck with two questions: Why don’t I have a more professional wardrobe? And why should I have a more professional wardrobe?

Jeans, comfy sweaters and oversized sweatpants are what feel good in this college student’s life. And we college girls can make casual clothes look good. Yet, there will always be those occasions for which we’re unprepared unless we’re willing to hit the upper-end stores and begin building a wardrobe to combat getting-dressed stress.

The intelligent thing for me to do would be to buy several shirts that I know would look good under my suit, and perhaps invest in a pair or two of slacks with which the shirts could also be paired. But the part of me that doesn’t want to spend money on clothes I won’t wear in the next month simply won’t let me, even though I know there will be another wardrobe conundrum within the next two or three months.

The answer is this: We can still blame it on college. I will. Unless you’re planning on entering the professional world in the very immediate future, the age or stage at which improving your wardrobe becomes absolutely inescapable is somewhere around 30.

Erin Lawley is the assistant A’E editor and doesn’t want to grow up just yet — she wants to be a hoodie-and-jeans kid. E-mail her at enl1@pitt.edu.