There has been a lot of discussion in the media recently about the love lives of certain men, some of which has been fuelled by recently published or up-coming biographies of famous men, detailing their conquests in the boardroom and the bedroom.

One thing that’s interesting about some of these men is that they are immediately identifiable by their distinctive and limited clothing choices. Simon Cowell, for example, wears jeans. He wears jeans with a white T-shirt, or a black T-shirt, or a white shirt. Giorgio Armani and Karl Lagerfeld both wear fitted suits in black with white shirt, black tie and – for Lagerfeld, shades.

There are advantages to having a casual uniform.

1.    You never have to coordinate anything – your clothes all work together, all the time
2.    If you choose a look that suits you, you always look your best, so you can get on with your life (perhaps that’s how Cowell does it? Less time in front of the mirror equals more time spent spotting talent?)
3.    You don’t have to spend time shopping.

On the downside, the casual uniform can go horribly wrong

1.    Your look may date you – Simon Cowell’s high waistbands have earned him a lot of derision
2.    You may become clothing wallpaper – if you’re not a millionaire mogul or a fashion high flyer your chosen look might lead to you blending into the background once people get used to seeing you around.
3.    Your look may not be your best – Jimmy Savile may have thought he looked great in a tracksuit but Gok Wan might have told him to lose the trackies and get stylish!

Can casual uniforms work for men? is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog

Jubilee fever is here, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s a particularly British kind of fever though, and the symptoms include grumbling, head-shaking and negative comments. If you’re not a Brit, it would be easy to believe we’re not looking forward to the Jubilee and the Olympics, but that’s just the way we show our enthusiasm along with queuing and complaining about the weather. We love it really.

And red, white and blue are everywhere. Union Jack biscuits, dip-dye haircuts and waistcoats abound, so how does the average stylish individual cope with this sudden desire to dress like a deckchair on acid?

The answer is coordination. For men, this year’s big deal on casual clothing will be white. Spearheaded by the David Beckham underwear phenomenon, layered white clothing will be big for guys: aim for a white vest, under a white shirt or a white polo-shirt with white jeans and a navy jacket. Don’t attempt this look with very short hair though, as it can easily start to look like you’re an escaped mental patient, especially if you’re slim built. The hair look that goes with white clothing is longer than in many recent summers, tousled and shiny.

For women this year the trend will be into the navy end of the spectrum, picked out with a lot of bling. For casual wear, try mixing it up with a blue skirt and hoody with platform trainers and a big diamante brooch, or jeans, a striped blue and white shirt, pearls and a sleek updo finished off with a red, white and blue bow or rosette.

More formal wear is looking Olympian with blazers for both men and women being worn over pastel polo shirts. Taffeta skirts are around for women, worn with a camisole and beaded cardigans to allow for the changeable British weather. Umbrellas are de rigueur and of course the only acceptable brolly colour this year is red, white and blue!

Dressing for the street (party) is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog

As businesses increasingly invest in uniforms for staff, more and more people are trying to look good in workplace clothing that wouldn’t be their personal choice of attire.

If your employer wants you to look smart and professional, it’s one thing. But if the workplace uniform is a colour that makes you look ill, or fits you badly or just doesn’t sit well with your personal clothing style, it can become a source of tension and even stress.

There are a number of things you can do, to prevent this being a problem.

1. If you get to choose your uniform from a catalogue, ask for samples. The manufacturer or printer of company clothing will usually be able to provide pieces for you to look at and that will help you assess the fit of the clothing and how it will be to wear. That helps you make wise choices about what you opt for.
2. Examine the fit, where possible, by looking at the existing uniform worn by colleagues. It is always better to buy a size bigger and pay a little to have your clothing fitted to your form, than to buy too small and cram yourself into something uncomfortable for an eight or ten hour day.
3. If the colour is bad for you, look at what you can do to accessorise your workplace uniform. There are often restrictions on what you can wear over uniform but not under it, so a black polo-neck under an unflattering yellow or red polo will ‘take down’ the strong colour, or a pink camisole under a white shirt will add life to a colour that kills your complexion.

Looking good in a work uniform is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog

It’s claimed that America’s competitive industries are becoming more stylish as competition for scarce resources hots up. The trend has started in Hollywood, where the stars my have an unlimited budgets to dress themselves but those working in the film industry are needing to look smart or risk being seen as having not enough smarts (or resources) to make deals.

The Hollywood Reporter suggests that deal makers in America are moving away from their casual, Silicon Valley garb of polo shirts and jeans because the tough world at the box office (and especially with John Carter reported to be the biggest flop of Disney history) means that stylish dressing and power appearance are vital to looking serious.

Baseball caps and hoodies are out, and formal shirts are in. While suits are universal, they are definitely making a come-back and casual clothing is being reserved much more for ‘in the office’ days.

For women this dress sense often means dresses – tailored ones with long-sleeved jackets, or smart trousers with tailored shirts. Monogrammed shirts are big in Hollywood right now, and as monogramming adds little to the price of a shirt but can be a make or break in closing a deal, it’s definitely a discreet way of pegging yourself as a winner.

Sharper dressing for competitive industries is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog

According to a Mintel report into American men’s clothing choices, many men want to be more fashionable than they are – in fact a quarter of them would love to be able to be fashion conscious. A senior retail and apparel analyst at Mintel claims that 85% of men who say they shop just for comfortably clothing would be willing to step out of their ‘clothing comfort zone’ if they knew what looked good on them.

So how can a man get to be fashion conscious and clothing comfortable?

One way is to use the support of social media. Many more men are learning to try on clothing and then send a photo to their friends and family members for an instant vote on whether to buy the garment or not.

Another way is to create outfits online, using new platforms like pinterest, to pull together clothing boards for special events or to plan holiday packing lists, and then get others to have input to the suggested choices. This is proving increasingly useful for men when shopping online, as it allows other people to contribute to their boards by adding items that would work with existing clothing. For example, when planning clothing for a weekend away, a man may have a pair of trousers and a hoodie that he particularly wants to take along. He uploads picture of them to his board and then others add items to build capsule outfits. The hoodie, with a striped T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops for the beach, then the trousers with a casual shirt, boots and unstructured jacket for the Saturday evening and finally the hoodie with a black polo-shirt and the trousers for a trip to the pub on Sunday lunchtime. Other accessories such as caps and scarves, belts and even jewellery can be suggested and accepted or rejected and then, for the chosen items, searched for online to get the best price.

Fashion support for men is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog

Researchers at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, have found some interesting features of workplace clothing that are revealed in a recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Not only can our clothing influence the way other people think about us, it can actually influence the way we think!

According to the research, “ …cloth[ing] can have profound and systematic psychological and behavioural consequences for … wearers,” – what that means is that work-wear that is generally associated with attentive and careful behaviour, such as lab coats, will actually make the person wearing them more attentive and careful.

Of course this theory is individual specific – so if you associate T-shirts with creative endeavour, you may feel more creative when wearing a T-shirt to work, but if you associate hoodies with lounging around the house at weekends, you may find that wearing one to work actually decreases your productivity. Adam Galinsky, a co-author of the paper, calls this process of being influenced by clothing “enclothed cognition”.

For workplaces that don’t have a dress code this may be an incentive to reconsider their stance, and for individuals preparing for interviews, it may be worth considering which colours they associate with positivity and confidence and which shirts and trousers (or skirts) make them feel assured and dependable, as those are the qualities that they may gain from their clothing during the interview itself.

Work clothing can make you work harder is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog

As businesses continue to look at opportunities to cut costs and reduce expenditure, the relationship between business casual clothing and business productivity is being reassessed by many companies – and the subtle changes in requirements are catching out many employees who are finding their clothing choices are being highlighted in their annual review. Knowing this, here are the new rules for business casual and personal success:

1. Understand your organisation’s requirements. Some kinds of casual are more casual than others: a brokers office will have a different requirement to an oil company headquarters and a firm that manufactures bicycles will have different standards to one that creates bespoke furniture.

2. Remember that there are different standards within clothing: a pair of jeans that are pale and worn almost to the threads is a completely different prospect to a pair that are navy-blue, crisp and tailored. A white polo shirt with a crisp collar, worn with smart trousers is almost a business shirt, while a creased polo shirt in orange, worn with those faded jeans, is almost barbecue garb.

3. Don’t flash or flaunt flesh: for women in particular, too much skin on show is unhelpful – bare midriffs and deep cut tops or camisoles that reveal the cleavage do little for promotion prospects and may even cause a lack of unity in the workplace as the mixed messages can be detrimental to harmony and productivity.

4. Avoid anything that can cause offence: T-shirts with words or images can easily be misinterpreted, shorts and sandals may reveal areas of the body that other cultures, or even other individuals, would rather were kept covered.

5. While casual is open to interpretation, it’s important to bear in mind that the workplace is where work is done, and while you may be at your most productive in an old hoody and a pair of sweatpants, your clothing choices may disincentivise those around and could affect your chances of receiving the recognition your work deserves.

Business casual versus business productivity is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog

Many of us have to fly for business, and it can be quite difficult, as a new traveller, to get to grips with how to pack and what to wear, especially if you have to get off the plane, sometimes after a long flight, and get straight into a meeting, conference or negotiation.

Here are a few tips to help the novice business traveller look right and feel right and hit the ground running:

Carry your jacket onto the plane. It’s difficult to keep a formal suit looking good on a long flight, but certain kinds of jacket were made for business travel: tweet is pretty well uncrushable and looks great with a smart white cotton shirt. When you take it off and put it in the overhead locker, make sure you fold it carefully and lay it on top of your case, not beside it, or your jacket will end up crushed at the back of the locker by somebody else’s bag.

Wear a shirt with a top pocket – this can hold your passport and travel tickets but never put pens in shirt pockets because they tend to leak under cabin pressure and that’s the end of a good shirt and the way to make yourself look like a geek in a business meeting!

Put a plain white T-shirt in your carry on luggage. On a long flight you can take of that good white shirt and pull on a plain T-shirt to travel in. That means your shirt, neatly folded into your hand-luggage, stays fresh and you can relax and drop your meal down the front of your T-shirt without worrying that it will be seen by the people meeting you at the other end! And if the worst comes to the worst and you are trapped in an airport, you’ve got a change of clothes with you.

Wear zip up or slip-on boots. This means you can get your boots on and off easily for security without the hassle of laces for trainers. They look good enough for a business meeting too.

Care in the air – how to dress for business travel is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog

A-list actors took to the catwalk for Prada’s menswear show this week. Gary Oldman, was the show closer (and show stealer) but Adrien Brody, Jamie Bell and Willem Defoe also got up and dressed up for the catwalk show.

It opened with an outfit that will define the autumn look – a black coat (think Sherlock Holmes – Cumberbatch, style) worn with a white shirt and under that, a lightweight white polo-neck in silk. Lots of suit jackets, sharp tailoring and masculine detail were evident and key colours were black, white and red.

If you can’t see yourself, or the man in your life, wearing a white silk polo necked sweater under a shirt, consider going for a fitted white polo-shirt with a lightweight white T-shirt underneath. Same look, one notch down in power dressing.

But power really was the theme and high collars – even popped collars on polo-shirts and modern tailoring were very evident. Suit style jackets were often double-breasted and worn with badges or studs to make them less formal.

A recent report by Bain & Co claims that luxury menswear is currently the fastest-growing area of the clothing market with double the growth rate of luxury women’s wear and the trend towards evening dressing is set to continue. Cashmere scarves and monogrammed shirts are keynotes for everyday dressing in the year ahead.

Prada says man is power – this winter’s key items is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog

The party season is here and whether you love or hate it, you have to show up and show willing with your colleagues. It’s becoming more and more popular to offer the clothing guidance ‘business casual’ – but what does that mean for a party?

For men it means trousers, not jeans. Chinos are acceptable with a formal shirt but not with more casual clothing such as a jumper. A jumper can be worn with formal trousers though. Polo-shirts and T-shirts are not usually acceptable for men to wear for a ‘business casual’ party or dinner, but ties are not necessary and shirt sleeves can be long or short. Jackets are usually formal, not casual, and worn with scarves and gloves and overcoats if necessary.

For women it’s a huge problem because it can vary between a casual (cotton) dress and leggings to formal dress and pearls, from suit with silk blouse through to smart black jeans with a sparkly top. A skirt can be worn with a T-shirt and either long boots or enclosed shoes but not sandals or peep-toes. Clever women will put a dressy scarf, pashmina or shrug in their handbag along with hairpins and a sparkly hair accessory so that if they arrive and feel underdressed they can run straight to the ladies and smarten themselves up with an up-do and posh wrap.

Women’s jackets for business casual events should be fitted or fun-fur, more casual jackets are not considered acceptable. Of course if the venue has a cloakroom you may be able to get away with your warm but casual fleece.

The Casual Christmas Party and how to dress for it is a post from: Polo Shirts Blog