Five Ideas For Your Career Wardrobe After You Retire.

By Karen and Erica

We loved our wardrobes. We always felt that one of the great advantages women had in the workplace was the ability to expand their colors and patterns from blue and black to pink and red and turquoise and emerald, and from pinstripes to checks and paisleys and polka dots and animal prints. (Men can do that with a tiny sliver of fabric slung around their necks but they seem to have given that up too. A mistake. Compare what medieval kings wore with the "dapper mustard and brown suit” worn by the Duke of Windsor in the twentieth century. Where’s the fun, not to mention elegance, in mustard and brown houndstooth?)

That advantage exists forever, even, or especially, after you retire. But once your career is over, unless you plan to spend your waking hours serving on boards, you will not need your entire business wardrobe. So what to do?

We found that cleaning our closets put a little bit of an exclamation point on our new status as retired women, and at first it was a bit uncomfortable. We were admitting that our beloved careers were well and truly over. It’s all part of the mourning process, which is also the process for making a new start. Once we faced up to both reality and opportunity, we started to look forward to a new wardrobe.

When you are ready—which will take a while—go through your closet. Pick out things you really can’t bear to part with, things you are pretty happy to part with, and things in the middle.

• Restyle Your Favorites. If you are creative, think about refashioning your favorites. Once you are out of the corporate work you can be a little more flexible in how you look. We still wear our best suit jackets as blazers, and suit trousers with different tops. If we were creative would recreate some of our clothes—adding layers to skirts or ribbons on shirts or sparkling sequins on jackets. We have visions of what we might do with sparkly or neon paint for fabric. Or taking apart costume jewelry and sewing sparkly bits on to severe business jackets—or fake pearls around the neckline of a black top. Maybe we can find someone more creative than we are to help!

• Give The Others Away. Some clothes you will be ready to say goodbye to—those things you wore when you expected to have a difficult day with difficult people. We gave clothes to Dress for Success and Goodwill and Housing Works. And—we just heard about the Buy Nothing Project. Seems like another way to find a home for your clothes.

• Return To The Brand. Some brands take back their clothes so they can be resold. Check out Eileen Fisher’s Renew project or Coach’s Re(loved).

• Consign The Good Stuff. Take the clothes to a place like Buffalo Exchange. If you have fancy stuff, check out these websites. There are surely lots of local thrift shops in your area that accept clothes, though check any site out ahead of time as they may have restrictive policies.

• Recycle Your Textiles. If some of your clothes are pretty much done—unlike you—recycle them. There are many options, including in NYC dropping them off at your local Greenmarket for textile recycling, which is a big environmental issue.

Your clothes served you well, and you are sorry to give them up. When you do, maybe have a little celebratory lunch with your girlfriends to say goodbye to your old life. And to start to think about the fun you will have creating a new look for a new purpose.

Tell us how you have restructured your wardrobe. Especially if it involves adding buttons and bows and sequins to interesting places!