Dress the Part

“If I give you this job, you’re going to have to dress better.” It was early in my museum career and I had just been offered a major promotion. So, I focused my attention on how I should be dressing, invested in a business wardrobe, and never looked back.

A couple of years ago, I was looking for someone to fill a highly visible position and brought a candidate in for a second interview. Great resume. Great phone interview. But the applicant showed up in clothes I would not wear to wash my car. Different generations have different ideas about what constitutes work-appropriate clothing, but this was something else entirely. I couldn’t even consider someone who would dress that way for a job interview.

A short digression: I’m at a party in Cambridge. A man I’d just met looks at me, tilts his head and says, “Let me guess. A position of responsibility in an arts-related organization.” I don’t remember what I was wearing, but obviously it spoke very clearly.

In fact, clothing speaks much louder than words. This spring, I led a couple of resume review sessions at a national museum conference. After one of the sessions, I spent a little time with a woman who was seeking a position in an art museum. Despite her impressive credentials, she’s offered volunteer opportunities and board positions, not the actual paying job she wants. This was easy to understand. Women who work in art museums tend to have a specific look, a certain style. This elegant, stylish woman in her pink tweed jacket and pearls looked exactly like a museum trustee.

Clothing is theater. The way you dress defines the role you play.

Living in Reloville

Last week, Peter Kilborn published a book called Next Stop, Reloville: Life Inside America's New Rootless Professional Class. It describes the "relos" for whom relocation has become a way of life. The classic relo family has a father who works for a large corporation that transfers them every three or four years, a mother who stays home in a high-end subdivision, and kids who have to re-establish themselves in new schools. They're affluent, and rootless.

For thirteen years, I moved a lot for career reasons. I didn't work for a large corporation, I had a series of museum jobs. In some cases, I knew they would be transitory. In others, they just didn't work out. But every three or four years, my husband and I would uproot ourselves and start again somewhere else.

By Kilborn's definition, we were not classic relos. My career drove the process, not his. We don't have kids. We never lived in a subdivision. But we did have to re-establish ourselves, over and over again, and our lives had no context. No one knew who we had been before. They only knew who we were then.

You expect to leave your friends and family behind when you relocate. What you don't think about is that you have to reconstruct every detail of your life: new doctors, dentists, drycleaners. One of my favorite jackets, a spectacular designer piece I had found in a thrift store, was shredded-- literally shredded-- in a dry cleaner that apparently employed Edward Scissorhands. I carried it around for years, in the apparent belief that I would find a faith healer who could wave his hands over a mangled jacket and make it whole. I hunted for bakeries, places to eat breakfast. I stopped strangers on the street and ask where they get their hair done.

As we left each town, we left what was best about each of them. Orlando had Cuban food, a dog park with the best swimming lake, wonderful birdwatching and canoing. Harrisburg had great crafts shows, an amazing jazz piano player at a local bar (really) and a group of terrific women ("Women with Attitude") who met once a month for drinks. I made two really close friends in Pittsfield and it has the incredible cultural richness of the Berkshires.

Three years ago, we came home. Reloville is an ok place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there forever.

Sometimes it really isn't your fault. My friend Jim was an absolutely competent local reporter who covered city council sessions and school board meetings for a regional newspaper in New Jersey. His newspaper hit a rough patch and he lost his job. (In retrospect, this was an early warning sign for the transformation of the newspaper industry, but no one could have known this at the time.) Problem was that at the same time, one of the biggest newspapers in the region went under. (Another early warning sign, this one a little bit louder.) So Jim was competing for newspaper jobs-- which have always been tough to get-- with people who had won Pulitzer Prizes. It took him a very long time to find another job. He was just as competent as he always had been. The competitive environment had changed around him.

I've talked to a lot of people who are looking for work in the last couple of months. Some just finished graduate school. Some were downsized. Most of them are struggling to stay positive-- trying not to internalize the situation. A situation which really is not their fault.