What To Do With Your Career Clothes When Your Career Ends? Wear Them!

By Karen and Erica

You probably thought that when you retired, you would also retire your work wardrobe. Even if you love your clothes, you won’t need them any more. You’ll be wearing much more casual clothes from now on, especially after COVID. Sweats, most days, maybe.

Or will you?

We weren’t sure what to do with our clothes after we retired. At first, of course, one of us was going to get another full time job right away, so she would still need those suits. Wrong. No-one wanted to hire either of us.

After that fantasy ended, the question was really presented. Should we give away our work clothes?

We had both dressed very carefully for work. We chose clothes and shoes with color and style, clothes that made us happy and also made us stand out from the men. Reds and pinks and purples and emeralds and turquoises—along with some navy and black. (No brown.) We loved those clothes and shoes. We didn't want to part with them. And—you never know what might come up. Right? Besides, like some women we met recently, we rather enjoyed going into our closets to visit with our favorite clothes.

Well, the time came when we really did need to change our approach to dressing, but not exactly in the way we had assumed we would. We did donate clothes, but we kept the ones we couldn’t bear to part with. And we wear them. We wear suit jackets with jeans, and suit pants with sweaters. We wear the shoes we loved with lots of other outfits. And we came to realize we were never going to spend all of our time in really casual clothes. We dressed differently when we left the house—even to go grocery shopping—than we did when we came home at night and got ready to cook and stream a show.

We also understood, as we realized we were redefining retirement and age, we needed to present an image of retired career women that was consistent with who we are. If we wanted to have the kind of post career life we envisioned, we would have to look the part. If we wanted to make it clear we were not done, we would have to look like we were not done. If we said we were stylish, cutting edge people, we would have to dress that way. We wanted to keep our places in the wider world, so when we connected with all the new people we were meeting, we needed to look like that’s where we belonged.

So we have certainly changed our look, but not entirely. We try to import the rules of the road that we learned when we worked. It was our strong view that when you are at work—even remotely—you should dress as if you are engaged in a purposeful activity. And women should always use the advantage that dressing gives them—our clothes are so much more expressive and inventive—and interesting!

After our careers were over, we wanted to be engaged in purposeful activity too—engaged differently than when we were climbing the ladder but cognizant of the formality of the engagement. So just as we did when we worked for our wonderful institutions, we began to dress for work. And all those work clothes we kept came in handy!