The Prelude:
It had taken 15 years to get to this point and it couldn’t come soon enough. For the first time ever in my life I didn’t have to wear a school uniform. I had gotten into an all-girls boarding schooling was looking forward to my ‘fashion freedom’. No more white shirts. No more flammable pleated skirts. Don’t get me wrong, I understood the reasoning for school uniforms- it allowed all students to be equal, and allowed focus to be on our studies rather than who had the latest fashions. However, understanding something rationally is still different very from how something feels, and uniforms felt awful. Sitting in a classroom, wearing a stiff skirt was actually distracting. I was now finally going to go to a school that understood my perspective.
The problem (as it turns out) is that when you tell 300+ teenage girls at an all-girls boarding school that they can wear whatever they want to class. The math was simple: To be at class by 8:50 am you, would have to get up at around 8:15 am in order to shower and get dressed. However, by wearing pyjamas to class you could sleep in until 8:40 am. Given there were no boys to impress, those 25 minutes were totally worth it to many. Unfortunately at the time, the school caught on fast, resulting in a new ‘dress code’ being imposed. It wasn’t a uniform but still, this ‘code’ represented a breach in my freedom to wear I wanted: something comfortable. I started calculating the fashion-related implications of this new code as I refused to give up my comfort to look ‘presentable’. In general (at least from what I can remember) the dress code said no pyjamas or sweatpants and whatever they defined as ‘slutty’. This left me with the following options:
T-shirts, cardigans and jeans for those days when I felt like getting dressed up.
Sweatshirts/hoodies and stretchy (spandex) pants for those ‘blah’ days (you know how those are!)
For shoes: Birkenstocks or flip-flops for the warmer months, Ugg slippers (yes I wore those outside) or boots for the colder months.
I was reasonably happy with the options I had come to and spent the next four years navigating the complicated waters of being ‘comfortably presentable’.
The Point :
Our current reality of ‘COVID-19’ is bringing me back to the boarding school days where I was challenged by the concept of being ‘comfortably presentable’. At home, I want to be comfortable. To me this means a sweatshirt, spandex and Ugg slippers (oh how times have changed) . At work I have to be presentable, meaning actual pants or skirt and a top. Having to work from home now, but still needing to be presentable in my non-stop Zoom meetings means I can’t cant get away with wearing a sweatshirt. While I am by no means an expert in being ‘comfortably presentable’, here are a few tips and tricks to survive these video-conferencing days.
Here are some of my favorite ‘comfortably presentable’ pieces that (hopefully) won’t violate your right to wearing comfy clothes at home while still looking like you take your job seriously:
Happy Trotting!
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