Every new beginning starts with office merchandise.  Companies distribute office merch for their rebranding, the adoption of a new program, or the launch of a new product.  Boxes are opened with all size T-shirts printed with the new tag line.  Everyone loves a free T-shirt.  These days my company distributes both male and female sizing.  I always get a male’s large.

For years, I have been wearing my company’s free T-shirts as home clothes (clothes I only wear at home).  I wear them while I clean or when I decide to dye my hair at home because I forgot to book an appointment with Kris that month.  For the most part I don’t wear T-shirts to work even when provided by the company.  At one point I had a whole drawer full of T-shirts I wasn’t wearing often enough for that type of real estate. Like everyone in the corporate world, I need more closet space.

Fall is here and I am excited to pull out my jackets and coats.  I would love to say that I’m also pulling out my turtlenecks, longs sleeves and sweaters but my office building runs the AC all day every day.  It can be 78 degrees outside, but my office will be 64 degrees.  So, no matter how sunny and hot it’s outside I am running my heater.  The irony is that everyone is running their heaters inside.

Today, I felt so cute with my cream long sleeve square neck sweater, brown silk midi skirt, and my cute nude kitten heels.  I was able to pull off a sandwich of colors using my color palette, I felt great.  I paired my outfit with some gold jewelry and off I went to work.  Simple fall colors and felt super comfortable.  The secret of it all is that I spent about $60 for the whole outfit, and I felt double the price.

This morning I looked through my bottoms and gravitated towards the brown silk midi skirt.  That’s how I built my outfit today.  Most of my tops are basic in neutral colors.  I tend to be more comfortable wearing loud bottoms rather than tops.  I always pair my loud bottoms with a basic neutral top.  And there you have an outfit that looks trendy and put together with just the right amount of sass.

I pick loud bottoms as if I can’t look all the way down and see how loud my bottom half is.  I tell myself if I am wearing a neutral top everything is fine as it’s closer to my face.  The closer to your face the more time you spend seeing it all day.  Compared to looking farther down to my bottom half, I will not make the effort when I’m busy at work.  So, I tend to take more risks and being bolder with bottoms.  Sounds lazy, I know.  It works.