Dress to impress Though today’s office envornment has gotten to be considerabally more casual over the past few years, the old adage “dress to impress” still rings true.  The trend towards casual dress came about primarialy with the dot-com boom of the early nineties.  During this revolution in silicon valley, upstart companies were being run by young management with new ideas about what an office should look like and how it should be run.    Though these companies worked their employees long, hard hours, they didn’t adhere to all of the standards of the business world.  Casual dress was normal, and programmers often showed up to work in jeans and t-shirts. Though it may sound inviting to show up at the office in a sweatshirt and jeans, it’s probably not a great idea, especially if you’re showing up for a job interview.  Regardless of where you’re applying for a job, if you’re arriving for an interview it’s always a great idea to dress to impress.  If you’re not quite sure what to wear, remember that overdressing for the occasion is a much better problem to have than being undressed for the occasion.  If you’re overdressed, your interviewer is most likely to think that you’re particularly professional, while if you undress your interviewer will think you’re a slob at best; at worst the interviewer will think that you really don’t care very much about landing the job. If you dress to impress, your strategy will probably work.  For men this means at minimum a pair of dress pants, a dress shirt, and a tie.  For women, a business suit is a good way to go, as is a long skirt and professional shirt.  Though this may seem to rigid and old-fashioned, rigid and old-fashioned is exactly the way you want to dress until you get a better feel for the dress code wherever you end up working.  If you show up to the first day of work wearing a tie and everyone else is wearing golf shirts, you don’t have much to worry about.  However, if you show up in a golf shirt and everybody else is wearing three-piece suits, you’re going to look sloppy.  When you dress to impress you always err towards the side of dressing too formally. “Hold on,” you say, “I can’t afford a whole bunch of business suits.  Do you know how much they cost?!”  It’s not always expensive to dress to impress.  For example, with a number of different shirt and tie combinations you can get by with only having a few coats or jackets.  By the same token you can get away with having a fairly thin closet if you mix and match, since it’s the combination of clothes that people will focus on, not individual items.