Fashioning a Professional Wardrobe in College

This article provides the necessary steps to building your professional wardrobe while you are in college.

By Kaitlin Meyer — December 5, 2022

Tags: attire, clothing, community building, dress for success, dress to impress, formal wear, interviewing, job search, networking, professional, style, work clothes

Fashioning a Professional Wardrobe in College

Are you stressed out about what to wear to an interview? Instead of rushing to put together the perfect outfit at the last minute and filling your life with more stress, try following these steps to fashion your professional wardrobe. What you wear to class isn't high stakes like the clothing you will wear to your first job interview. As such, classes, campus events, and meetings with faculty are great places to get comfortable with formal clothes and find a professional style that suits you. Plus, you'll have the bonus of looking more stylish than all your classmates!

This article provides the necessary steps to building your professional wardrobe while you are in college. To keep things simple, we will focus on creating a capsule wardrobe, a small collection of seven to twelve color-coordinated clothing items that you can pair in seemingly infinite ways to create a substantial array of outfits (Leanne, 2002; Nguyen, 2022). This is perfect f or those who cannot decide what to wear in the morning by limiting our options and ensuring a clean, coordinated look.

Choose Signature Colors

Before browsing outfits, it's a good idea to learn what colors match your skin tone, eyes, and hair. To determine your skin tone, look at the veins inside your wrists. If you are warm-toned, your veins will look greenish, and if you are cool-toned, your veins will look more blue or purple (Lenahan, 2018). It might be hard to tell if you are neutral—your veins may look like both colors. If all else fails, ask a friend what colors look best on you and go from there!

If you have a warm skin tone, your colors are likely on the warmer side of the color wheel: reds, oranges, yellows, and browns. If you have a cooler tone, you should opt for blues, greens, grays, and purples. Green and purple can usually cross over since they are on the border between warm and cool. For example, olive green can be a good option for warmer-toned people. Some other colors, such as blush, are very forgiving and tend to look good, whatever your skin tone. If you have a neutral skin tone, congratulations! You are a jack of all colors. Other things to keep in mind are your hair and eye color. If you have green eyes, accenting an outfit with a green scarf or blouse will bring out your eye color. If you are a redhead, you may want to steer clear of bright oranges. When choosing your signature colors, consider using complimentary colors, which are opposites on the wheel, and analogous colors, which are neighbors on the wheel (MasterClass, 2021).

While these are good rules of thumb for fashion in general, we can bring them to bear on the professional wardrobe in unique and new ways! The world of professional dress is muted: it is full of grays, blacks, whites, and softened colors. The bright accent or the right subtle color can go a long way in such a world.

Testing Phase I: Find Your Style

Now that you have learned or reviewed some rudimentary fashion, it's time to start exploring! In this phase, you will collect the building blocks of the wardrobe: slacks, other dress pants, button-up shirts, blouses, skirts, dresses, blazers, and appropriate shoes. If you want to build a matching wardrobe, try sticking with one or two base colors: black, gray, dark blue, or brown. Try buying or borrowing one new item of professional clothing every week or two, depending on your budget. You can opt for thrift stores, new clothing stores, or online shopping. Some online stores, such as StitchFix or Amazon Wardrobe, will send you a piece of clothing just to try out for a small fee, and you can decide to buy it or return it.

Now that you have your first item, try different combinations of your clothes with it for two or three days out of the week. College is a perfect opportunity to try new outfits and ideas with relatively low stakes. After all, your professor isn't going to fire you for the way you dress. If you like what you see, keep the item and move on to another for the next week. Otherwise, return, resale, or donate your unwanted item. Then, repeat the process until you have a small collection of the basics.

Testing Phase II: Accents

This is, in my opinion, the best part of the wardrobe project: finding pieces in your color. This phase has two main goals: choosing a statement piece and buying shirts, scarves, ties, socks, hair accessories, and other items in your chosen colors.

A statement piece is the focal point of your style: it is bold and unique, and the rest of your outfit is built to complement it (One Dapper Street, 2019). This piece is not strictly necessary for a professional wardrobe but can add more style and boost confidence. Some examples include a large patterned scarf, a colored or patterned blazer or sweater, a long overcoat (try faux leather), and many more. Remember that you likely already own one or more statement pieces you can build a professional wardrobe around. Many fun statement pieces won't necessarily work for the professional wardrobe, so keep this in mind when selecting one. Lastly, your statement piece will likely influence what colors and accents you choose to include in the capsule wardrobe. Selecting a good statement piece may take a few weeks of trying different things; just be patient until you find something you love!

Finally, you will want to add a couple of colorful shirts, a sweater or cardigan, and some accessories to the wardrobe. These should be in your signature colors and have a style that works with your basic pieces. Once again, try these out with some of your already selected pieces when you attend class to narrow down your favorites. Once you have selected a few, you are ready to assemble your wardrobe!

Create Your Collection

Now all you have to do is put all the pieces together. Ideally, most items will match one another, allowing you to stay fresh without constantly buying more clothes. Try different outfits from your new wardrobe for class; maybe you'll find something to add or switch up some of your pieces, and bam! Rest in the glory of your new professional wardrobe: get ready to whip it out when you are attending job fairs, going to interviews, and, eventually, at your future job!

Kaitlin Meyer

Kaitlin Meyer is a Master's student at Ohio State University (OSU), and is writing a thesis on snow microstructure inspired by her love for skiing. She earned a B.A. in Liberal Arts from Wyoming Catholic College (WCC).

View all posts by Kaitlin Meyer