How Should I Dress for Work Now?

A reader wonders how to update her job uniform after a year of sweatpants and Zoom shirts.

This is the general dilemma we are all facing, after a year working from home in leggings and Zoom shirts, or outside the bubble in P.P.E. The other evening I was actually going out to dinner with friends in a restaurant, and I spent about 30 minutes just staring into my closet as if it were a foreign territory, trying to remember what I used to wear. After all, we’ve been changed, pretty essentially, by the pandemic. So, too, our clothes need to change. We can’t pretend the last year didn’t happen, nor can we dress as if the last year didn’t happen. Which leaves us where? As you note, there is a growing body of punditry coalescing around the idea that we will soon be in for a Roaring Twenties redux with its go-go party dressing ethos. (You can understand it: That decade also emerged out of a pandemic.) But 21st-century flapper is not exactly office-appropriate clothing.