<p>Or their parents were not upper-class fashionistas for whom wearing well fitted dressy clothes was frequent.</p>
<p>Most kids are smarter than you think. My son figured out how to dress nicely on his budget and I don’t remember giving him fashion lessons. I doubt he’d listen if I tried.</p>
<p>Does no one watch the ABC program “Shark Tank”? A show where budding entrepreneurs (i.e. the “beggars”) seek money from very wealthy investors… How does dressing like a homeless person or a frat boy going to a ‘kegger” party inspire confidence that the money invested will be paid back and with interest? If you, as your friends suggest, dress as if you don’t take yourself too seriously, your business plan better be a gift from the gods. Spotting you a few bucks for a pizza is one thing, an investment of some thousands of dollars with the expectation of a payback and a stake in a growing and profitable business is quite another. YOU have to earn the confidence and trust of your investors, especially “angel” investors (friends and family). As a fan of “Shark Tank”, the casualty rate for “angel” investors is high. Do you really want to tell grandma that her money is “gone”? </p>
<p>Wardrobe…? Show some respect for the money and wear a suit. You are making a case for investors to loan you money, not establishing that you’re going to a Friday morning 8:00 AM econ class. Ditch the blue blazer and khaki pants. It’s such a collegiate clich</p>
<p>Great suggestion! Shark Tank (or a similar segment during the CNBC morning lineup) is a terrific tool for any entrepreneur to be. Here are some mistakes people make:</p>
<p>Mistake # 1: dressing too casually. You are usually greeted according to the way you are dressed, as my grandpa used to say. He was a tailor 
First impressions set the tone for the rest of the meeting.
Mistake # 2: a fatal one - not having a well thought out business plan. The angelic sharks (shark-like angels) do not want your blood, they want to see the money. SWOT, 5Cs, etc. Do your homework!
Mistake # 3: asking for too much upfront.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>Pizzagirl- I think you are a bit over-the-top with the whole “parents failing them” thing. Seriously???</p>
<p>Our family is fairly casual and to tell you the truth, I can’t think of anywhere we would go that would require my boys to really dress up. Even when we attend theater in Los Angeles, clothing that we see ranges from torn jeans to suits and my boys always fell squarely in the middle. The only reason our youngest son owns a suit is that he decided he did not want a tux for prom his senior year, and so he and his friend went to Mens Warehouse and each bought a suit on the Buy One, Get One Free promotion. That was less than a year ago, and he has since grown significantly so it is now too small for him. Maybe it depends where you live- we live near the coast in So. Calif., and people here just do not dress up for entertainment. However, my kids know how to shake hands, introduce themselves, my boys open car doors, etc. and their manners are impeccable. I don’t think we have failed our children, or if we have, they haven’t noticed yet.</p>
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<p>I think Pizzagirl has an important point that is being missed. It is not the parents’ ability to buy expensive clothing as it is their desire to teach the skill set of “dressing correctly for the occasion” from an early age that allows (or should allow by age 18) their kids to be able to google men’s or women’s business wear, go to Target by themselves, and make a decent choice.</p>
<p>Diplomacy Award to FinanceGrad for Post #86</p>
<p>Oh puh-leez on the upper-class fashionista thing. Give me a break. </p>
<p>Plenty of working and middle class people on tight budgets still have something in their closets that they can pull out when an occasion warrants it - when they are going to a nice dinner, or to a church, or a baby shower, or a wedding, or a reunion, or a funeral or whatever. Stop pretending that having something in your closet beyond jeans and t-shirts and sneakers requires a) oodles of money and / or b) an abiding interest in fashion.</p>
<p>My spouse employs about 20 people who are all solidly working or middle class. I guarantee that when it’s time for the annual holiday party at a nice restaurant, the women can all pull on a pair of dress black pants and a sweater and some flats, and the men can all figure out how to put on a pair of pants that aren’t jeans.</p>
<p>We took DS to Mens Warehouse last year. Using their BOGO deal, we were able to get him a suit and blazer. It did cost a more than just a suit off the rack at Kohls, but none of them fit him very well. And frankly I think he’ll wear the blazer more than the suit. </p>
<p>DS had been cooperative but skeptical about the whole thing. But when he tried on the pieces after they had been custom tailored for him, he was quite impressed.</p>
<p>The OP is going to be asking for investment of over a million dollars. I think appropriate attire for this meeting has been covered pretty well at this point, so I’m touching on another area where there’s been some contention.</p>
<p>~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ </p>
<p>PG, sometimes it’s hard to see it from another angle that’s very different than your own. College age young men often change in size and shape <em>a lot</em> from the time of their high school graduation. Now, if you were a young man of, say, age 20, who lived somewhere where it’s much more casual and had not had need for anything formal for the past two years (why? you’re going to school, maybe working part-time or full-time over the summer) and last you’d ever needed to so much as think about anything of this nature, mom had taken charge of it all and made it happen. Boom, you’re now facing something for the first time as an adult (internship at company where you have to dress nice, interviews, you name it) and getting the dress shoes, a suit, alterations, possibly looking at spend a couple two or three hundred dollars or so (there are many options besides Target or Neiman Marcus). Perhaps you’d flounder for just a moment or two, or not take it very seriously or be very busy and not located near the places you need to shop for this stuff or procrastinate. You might just ask a question before you forked out the change. The first time you might show up not looking A1. Next time you’ll know. Kudos to the young man who asks for help early enough to get it right.</p>
<p>I interview a lot of people. I check out what they wear, their shoes, bags, hair cut, if they take notes during the interview, have a printed resume… I pay special attention to shoes because most people would put on a nice suit, but it takes a lot of attention to detail to have a nice pair of clean/polished shoes. We are jeans and t-shirt work place, but don’t show up anything less than business when coming for an interview.</p>
<p>Note to self:
Convince s’s to buy nicer shoes, even if they don’t have any interviews upcoming. (I dislike the shoes they choose to wear when they clean up.)</p>
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<p>Another factor is that some male subcultures actually view dressing up too well, especially to impress others as contrary to their distorted definitions of masculinity/machismo or in some extreme hippie-ish/anti-corporate subcultures, an example one has “sold out to the man”. </p>
<p>While the hating on those wearing suits to please formal looking employers and female dates is from the extreme side, this attitude does tend to permeate somewhat to the wider society. </p>
<p>One good example was the extent the “metrosexual” was heavily lampooned among many male communities as being “too feminine” or “kissing up” when it was hyped in the MSM several years ago. Not saying that’s right, but it’s another factor which influences the lack of being clothing-aware among younger males. </p>
<p>Another example from my own educational and professional experience is the professional culture in some very tech-heavy oriented academic departments/firms where overly formal “dressy suits” were contemptuously dubbed “monkey suits” and those who were known to voluntarily/enjoyed wearing them or otherwise dressing too fashionably regarded as “pointy-haired manager types” or “those who kiss up to suits” and thus, not “real techies/nerds*”. </p>
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<li>In such contexts, being considered a nerd was considered a high compliment which many of us wanted. 
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<p>IME, the only employers/HR who inspect clothing to that extent are much more likely to be one or more of the following: female, ex-military from units expecting high spit & polish uniform standards*, and/or “a fashionista”. </p>
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<li>This was the case with a elementary school classmate’s father who served stints as a drill sergeant during his 20+ years in the Marines. On the other hand, this wasn’t nearly the case with other ex-military folks I knew who served in areas where high spit & polish standards weren’t as demanded…or impractical such as front-line infantry, aircraft/engine maintenance, or some aviation units. If anything, some of the latter group would lampoon their more spit & polish counterparts when recounting stories of their service careers.</li>
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<p>What the heck are you talking about? Never mind. Rhetorical question.</p>
<p>OP-
My DH was in charge of a tech conference where several undergrads from 2 different schools were invited to come help out. The students from the Tech school came dressed extremely casually, one wearing a t-shirt from the well known-named company she probably interned at. The students from the lesser known school, who were learning the specific software package this conference was about, were dressed smartly but appropriately (button down shirts and slacks, etc) and handed out business cards. </p>
<p>And BTW, the students from the lesser known school who graduate with certification in this software package typically get jobs right out of undergrad earning 6 figures, or close to, in many of the companies headquartered here that use this software package.</p>
<p>This must really be a generational issue. When I was young you got dressed up for church. If we went out for dinner, you got dressed up. We got dressed up to have dinner at Howard Johnson’s. My father worked for one of the airlines and when we travelled, we got dressed up (even today I will be more dressed up on a flight than 90% of the passengers). When I went to college I had a sport coat/blazer and a suit. Even in college, you were supposed to wear a tie to class.</p>
<p>Having purchased my share of clothes over the years, I know that suits (especially good quality suits) can be very expensive. I always bought new and I always bought them on sale. Lately (because I don’t need a lot of suits) I tend to buy my clothes on eBay. I will admit that it drives my wife crazy, but I save a ton of money (even after alteration). The other thing is that I know my exact size in Brooks Brothers clothes, so the tag will tell me everything I need to know. YMMV.</p>
<p>There are places that sell cheap enough business suits that the cost shouldn’t be a major barrier to MOST college seniors/graduates in a position to apply to jobs that require it. I’m sure there are comparatively rare cases in which such a student nonetheless finds such an outfit beyond his means, but I think it is silly to draw general conclusions from that kind of extreme scenario. I mean, if one poster suggested that people in situation x call a support hotline for guidance, the appropriate response wouldn’t, in my opinion, be “How dare you! What if a person’s phone has been disconnected for lack of payment? What if he’s homeless? What if he’s deaf? What if he’s Amish, and has serious moral objections to modern technology?” All of those things are possible, and require their own specific responses, but they are’t relevant in 99.99% of situations.</p>
<p>I don’t think parents who haven’t taught their kids to dress themselves for formal occasions are remiss, depending on family background and income, but learning, in a basic sense, what is appropriate to wear, is just part of entering a professional adult world… If a student’s background hasn’t prepared him for this, he’ll have to learn it on his own, just as he would have to learn to read in order to hold down most jobs if his K-12 education had left him barely literate.</p>
<p>I am certain that the OP has run for hills by now.</p>
<p>Nice post, apprentice prof. </p>
<p>I don’t buy that most people don’t have at least one or two occasions per year that call for more than jeans. People go out to nice dinners. They go to weddings, funerals, showers. They go to someone else’s church service. They meet someone “important” (a girlfriend’s parents, the boss’ house for dinner). This is not some exotic thing here to have occasions beyond jeans and sneakers. I still stand by my opinion. If you haven’t exposed your kid to occasions beyond slob and taught them what to do, you’ve failed them just as surely as if you haven’t taught them to shake hands or say please and thank you.</p>
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<p>It could also be whether one’s inclined to conformity to the prevailing norms or if one feels the prevailing social norms are too unreasonable/confining, to challenge them. </p>
<p>One of those unreconstructed hippie parents of a HS classmate recounted how in the early '60s he was tossed out of an early morning freshman class and being marked absent for the day by his Professor at NYU for forgetting to wear a tie, even when he had everything else. That experience along with other issues and the coming of the counterculture of the mid-late '60s meant it wasn’t too long afterwards that he took part in protest movements which from his perspective, eventually meant the elimination of overly restrictive formal dress codes he experienced*. </p>
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<li>This was wrapped up in a spiel about the positive contributions hippies counterculturalists like him made to us younger folks ranging from ending the draft, no more mandatory ROTC for all male students on many college campuses, and general easing of sartorial standards in many areas of life…including no longer being mandated to wear suit and tie to college classes or IME…some professional fields/offices.</li>
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