<p>I agree with everyone above who has said that you will need a traditional suit at some point. </p>
<p>That being said (and granted he is an old guy), when DH is going with a less formal jacket and pant he wears Uniglo. He is tall and thin and their clothing fits him extremely well. Uniglo is youthful but not slick AND their prices are reasonable. If you decide that a jacket, slim cut pant and pressed shirt look will work, check out their website. Also, Banana Republic often has great sales. DH has a number of Banana Republic jackets that have held up really well.</p>
<p>Some parents even if they’re not impoverished reject the need for having social occasions which call for a step above jeans, t-shirts, or other informal clothes as they reject formal social or corporate subcultures which do demand more formality in dressing standards.</p>
<p>This describes many of the unreconstructed hippie parents I knew/encountered who continued to live their values up into the '90s and beyond…a handful in my HS years and many more in college. </p>
<p>Granted, they selected themselves into occupations/fields where informality in dress/other norms is the standard and some prospered to the point of being comfortably full-pay parents. </p>
<p>Just wanted to present one explanation for that. </p>
<p>However, this doesn’t apply to OP’s situation and is better off following advice from most in this thread. In that context, dressing up so one’s at-slightly above the dress standards of one’s audience…potential investors is correct.</p>
<p>Oh give it a break Cobrat. I went to college in the late 60’s…Woodstock generation. My husband, my kids and I all have dress up clothes for occasions that need them. Even back in the day, I didn’t wear my Indian print peasant dresses, and sandals to things that required more formal clothes. </p>
<p>And anyway…what does what happened with your peers in college in 1990s have to do with this student TODAY?</p>
<p>Just giving a possible explanation in reply to PG’s comment as it seems to exhibit a universalized worldview I know not every family/parent agrees with. Especially considering I knew several of them closely for an extended period. </p>
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<p>That’s YOU. That’s not always necessarily the case with all of the folks from your generation as illustrated by the same-generation parents I’ve known/interacted with. </p>
<p>I will grant you that they’re not mainstream, but they did exist and prove there are exceptions to the rule. The ones I’m talking about were certainly colorful and interesting people from whom I’ve learned plenty, even if I didn’t fully buy into all of their ideas/clothing choices to the extent they did.</p>
<p>Well, then, too bad for them. Too bad for them that they restrict themselves to life experiences that only call for them to stay in casual clothes. Too bad for them that they never go to a theater, a special dinner at a nice restaurant, a wedding, or any other kind of occasion where they spruce themselves up a little bit. Too bad that they cripple their kids – we’ve had kids on here who were in college and needed to pull themselves together beyond jeans / sneakers for a job interview or meeting a boyfriend / girlfriend’s parents and they hadn’t ever been given the tools to do so. My comment remains. Unless they were in poverty situations, shame on them. I grew up in a working-class background with a grandfather who worked in a factory, and yet we knew how to dress for church, a nice dinner, a wedding, etc. It has very little to do with money, and a lot to do with knowing how to present oneself. My kids are jeans and sneakers 99% of the time like any other college student, but they know how to put themselves together. There is nothing laudable about not knowing how to put oneself together, and there’s nothing laudable about being the kind of parent who deliberately doesn’t teach that to a kid.</p>
<p>How is that a “value”? “I reject looking nice when the occasion calls for it” isn’t a value. It’s just being whiny and defiant for the sake of being whiny and defiant.</p>
<p>My dad works at a well-known investment bank. One time, I was in Manhattan and needed to get home- luckily, my dad had a meeting in their main Midtown office, so I went over there to wait for the meeting to be done.
It was in the fall. I was wearing a three quarter sleeve t shirt, maxi skirt, and ballet flats. All very nice, tasteful and neutral.
A) They almost didn’t let me into the building until I said I was waiting for my dad.
B) I got an INCREDIBLE number of odd looks from the people (mostly men) in their three-piece suits.
C) A woman, wearing a business formal dress and jacket, came over to me and basically said, “I don’t know who you are, but if you ever want a job in a place like this, you have to respect where you are and who you’re dealing with.” And then she walked away.
I told my dad (who was basically the only one there not wearing a suitjacket- the little guy in the branch office) later on and he basically said that these are the bigwigs, the really senior billionaires, and they really care about this stuff. The NYU intern who was setting up the slide projector was wearing slacks and a blazer. They really care.
Sure, anecdotal, but as these are probably at least some of the people you’re interested in having invest with you, they really do care.
Slacks and a button-down shirt are the absolute MINIMUM. You want to look like someone who wanted to make a good impression. If you dress like a shlub, the investors will wonder how much you really care about being there. It’s all about respecting the clients. You show up in nice clothes, they know you put time into this.
Good luck!</p>
<p>ETA: I’m not saying they’ll only let you in if you’re in a three-piece suit, only that they basically ignore you if you’re not. When I first came in, the doorman directed me to the next building- that’s the one with the free t-shirts. There’s just a very formal mentality around there.</p>
<p>I know a lot of parents will not want to limit their kid’s experience even if they do live such life style. We tend to want what’s best for our kids, not just to follow our footsteps. It would be like telling our kids that there is no point in going to college or grad school because we didn’t go.</p>
<p>Not all parents are that good at choosing dressy business clothes either. Also, high school and college age guys are volatile with respect to size and shape, so what may have fit well at high school graduation may not fit well (or at all) several months later when the college student has an occasion to wear dressy business clothes.</p>
<p>After reading over all the posts on this thread, and getting insulted along the way for picking a goofy screenname 3 years ago when joining, it’s really unbelievable that there are SO many posts addressing a very simple question. The OP hasn’t even come back to post a second time because the answers have been way too much!</p>
<p>The answer to the OP’s question is: Yes, dress up! Period. Again, good luck. Period.</p>
<p>…as well as the resident fashionista named after the rusty old Bunsen burner that someone found in the back of a drawer in our lab and was going to toss in the garbage. Choco - I like your screen name!</p>
<p>OP, I live in Seattle where most folks don’t like to dress up, but at a recent startup pitch event kids who were pitching their business plans to VCs all wore some kind of slacks/blazer outfit - UNLESS they presented as a team. Some teams chose to wear khakis and matching tees/polos bearing their business’ logos.</p>
<p>“Not all parents are that good at choosing dressy business clothes either. Also, high school and college age guys are volatile with respect to size and shape, so what may have fit well at high school graduation may not fit well (or at all) several months later when the college student has an occasion to wear dressy business clothes.”</p>
<p>So then they get something different. Good lord. Only on CC is the idea of dressing appropriately in something other than jeans and sneakers an insurmountable problem for people.</p>
<p>Whoa! Take a chill pill, PG. UCB does have a good point as boys/men could continue growing in spurts well into their early 20s depending on genetics. </p>
<p>While I was lucky in having my major growth spurts in high school, some were quite substantial. Going from 5’2" to 5’7" in one summer period was a very interesting experience in many ways…including finding suitably sized clothes and social reasons. :)</p>
<p>As for choosing dressy clothes…parents may not always understand what goes well with their particular kid or what’s reasonably current. </p>
<p>If I went by my father’s or some older male relatives’ preferences, I’d look like a throwback from the late '60s/'70s in cheesy tweed in the similar shade of brown as Chewbacca or mud. Umm, no thank you! :D</p>
<p>OP- what have you made of all this advice? I was thinking that perhaps you can borrow a suit from a friend at school if you don’t have the time to shop. I know my daughters and their friends borrow dressy clothing all of the time. I’m not sure how it works though on the guy side.</p>
<p>On a little bit of a detour, my youngest daughter worked in finance this summer and she bought a lot of navy, gray and black light wool dresses/suiting. At one point in the summer while getting dressed, she told me that she would now have something to wear to a funeral if she needed to go to one. The correlation between work clothing and death cracked me up. Sick humor I think.</p>
<p>When my older daughter went off to college, she didn’t have any dress pants or conservative clothing. We shopped for what we jokingly labeled the “Hillel” outfit. Something she could wear to a Hillel event. Well, she never went to a Hillel event, but she was happy to have a nice pair of slacks and tops for meetings.</p>
<p>All this being said OP, I learned something very important from my own mother many many years ago. I learned that you prepare and get an outfit together in advance, but that once you have done this, you never question it again. You do not want to waste any additional precious time on this when your focus should be about wowing your potential investors. Also, your outfit only needs to be 85% good. Perfect is really not necessary.</p>
<p>Unless the male student concerned has a similar enough height, proportions, and build…this doesn’t work very well for the most part. And that’s not getting into the fact unlike most women, males could continue having growth spurts well into their college years and sometimes even early 20s. </p>
<p>In short, this makes borrowing fellow friends’ clothes very difficult and impractical. This is especially an issue if you’re unusually proportioned and/or extremely short or tall. In college, I was usually one of the taller males in the dorm. </p>
<p>Also, unless things have changed culturally, most undergrad males when I attended college didn’t have clothing-sharing arrangements to the extent I saw/heard about from female counterparts. Any clothes-sharing we did was limited to t-shirts and sometimes jeans.</p>
<p>Having observed many male college student interns and candidates at work dressed in poorly fitting dressy clothes, it does seem to be a common problem for many male college students. Which is why I suggested making sure that the clothes fit properly many posts ago.</p>
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<p>Often, they get more or less muscular or more or less fat based on often-significant changes in eating and physical activity habits between high school and college.</p>
<p>Funny story… DD didn’t take formal clothing to her first semester at engineering college. (It was not a huge risk - we lived an hour away.) But their intro-engineering class required a visit to job fair. She was easily able to borrow clothes, but only one friend had nice shoes that fit. Thus they had to plan such that only one or the other was there at the same time. Luckily it was held near their dorm.</p>
Choco - I like your screen name!</p>