Wednesday’s Workwear Report: Cashmere Tee
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Our daily workwear reports suggest one piece of work-appropriate attire in a range of prices.
(Thanks, readers, for your patience with our tech problems this morning!)
This classic J.Crew cashmere tee has been around for ages, but this polka dot version is a fun new twist. Folks have complained that the quality of the cashmere has been unreliable recently, but this style has great reviews for softness and quality.
With a boxy cut like this one, I would pair it with some slim-fitting trousers to balance out the proportions for the office, but I might lean into the boxiness and add some wide-leg denim for the weekend.
The sweater is $148 at J.Crew, but there are several other colors on sale, starting at $123.99. It comes in sizes XXS-3X.
Psst – Nordstrom has lipstick as their “daily deal” and there are a ton of great deals — I have two Chantecaille ones in my cart, but also options from Westman Atelier, Charlotte Tilbury, Lancome, NARS, MAC, Clinique, Valentino, and more.
Sales of note for 7/29:
- 7/29/26: Happy National Lipstick Day! Nordstrom, Ulta, Sephora, and more are all having great deals today on lipsticks! (Even Target has a “buy one get one 25% off” sale!) Here are all of our favorite lipsticks right now.
- Nordstrom – The Anniversary Sale continues! Here's our big roundup of the best workwear, as well as everything we've selected thus far. Don't forget to check to see if their daily beauty deal is a good one for you – e.g., 7/29 up to 40% off select lip products; 7/31 Bobbi Brown; 8/1 Jo Malone
- Ann Taylor – 50% off summer styles + 60% off clearance — readers love this blouse and I always love the variety of colors/textures for this jacket (it's a great separate)
- Banana Republic – 30% off your purchase (ends 7/31)
- The Fold – Up to 50% off, further markdowns + extra 10% off
- J.Crew – Up to 30% off
- J.Crew Factory – 50% off sitewide
- Me & Em – Sale! Up to 60% off (new lines just added, exclusively online)
- M.M.LaFleur – End of season sale! (Try code CORPORETTE15 for 15% off on other items)
- Nordstrom Rack – Clearance, new markdowns up to 75% off! Nice selection of Vince, Veronica Beard, Reiss and Rag & Bone, a ton of affordable work dresses from Calvin Klein, Maggy London, Eliza J, and Donna Morgan
- Talbots – 25% off your entire purchase
- Theory – End of season sale is on!
Coffee or lunch with a colleague. First person to arrive orders for themself and grants a table? Or waits for 2nd person to arrive and both get in line together?
Coffee, first to arrive orders and gets a table. Lunch, first person waits for the second and they order at the same time.
I usually do the former but also text to see if I can get the person something – “hey just got here, can I order you a latte? I’ll be sitting by the window”
For coffee, I don’t mind ordering before and then waiting at a table.
For lunch, I think it is a bit odd to order without the other person. I would tend to wait. But I also wouldn’t be offended if I were the second to arrive and my colleague had ordered without me.
It depends on how long or short the line is.
If there’s a long wait, I’ll get in the queue but wait to order until the other person has arrived. If there’s no wait, I’ll order and sit down.
Lunch – get a table, but wait until they arrive to order (although it is rare that we travel separately to the location).
Coffee – order, grab a spot, clean up my inbox while I wait for them to arrive.
Depends on the place. In my very busy downtown of a major city, you need to order to get a table and the first person there usually takes that on. If it’s more relaxed, I’d just wait.
Depends on the place. If you have a server, first to arrive is seated, but doesn’t order yet. If it’s counter service, first to arrive goes ahead and orders (maybe texts the other to ask if they can order for them) and then grabs a table, but doesn’t start eating or drinking yet.
*really just doesn’t start eating. Sipping your coffee or drink is normal
FWIW, I personally wouldn’t even order at a counter service place if I was meeting someone for lunch. If there is a long line, I would likely get in line. But I would still wait to order.
I don’t stand around waiting unless the restaurant won’t let me sit until the whole party arrives. It’s awkward and creates unnecessary congestion around the entrance. For coffee, I get my coffee and sit. For lunch, I’ll sit and peruse the menu.
Angine de Poitrine vibes.
My 7 year old is obsessed with this band! He is going to be them for halloween somehow.
Two things:
WTF happened with the Washington state bar exam yesterday? I got a bunch of panicky texts and the bar examiners seem to be whelp, there’s always February.
And apparently there are some Murder, She Wrote fan trips you can go on. As a future retiree, I’d love to go to a much cooler Maine coastal B&B, with stunning views and a side of murder. Cabot Cove beckons!
It was actually filmed in Mendocino on the CA coast and they have an annual weekend there.
Yeah as far as I know all the fan trips + the festival are in the Mendocino area. I highly endorse coastal Maine in the summer, we spend our summers there, but there’s not much of a connection to the TV show.
What is the summer weather like? I’m game even if it’s not in Maine.
Always delightfully cool and foggy, year round.
Coastal NorCal has pretty mild summers – high 60s/low 70s most days.
My sister just sent me a screen shot of the annual conference in Mendocino and I’m intrigued!
Yet another reason to go back to pencil-and-paper exams.
I’m 41 and taking a pencil and paper bar exam would have been really daunting to me. I’ve been typing long essays since I was 13 or so, and can type much much faster than I can handwrite.
I am 59 and typing was not an option when I took the bar (back in the dark ages). There are pros and cons to both mechanisms, but at least paper and pen is not subject to random tech outages.
In any event, I suspect that students are about to be forced to get better at handwriting since (based on the teachers I know) we are headed back to blue books to stop rampant cheating.
Good, I would welcome that. I loathe how tech-dependent education has become for my kids.
I am older than you and have also been typing everything since I was 12. As long as everyone has to take the test in the same format it is fair. The problem would really be with equity between standard test-takers (paper and pencil) and all the zillion people who would inevitably claim that their disability accommodations should include typing, not just extra time. (Yes, typing as an accommodation makes sense for certain disabilities. Not for most, though.)
Above the Law has an article on the bar exam–the new tech apparently just didn’t work.
Ugh. Like when people borrow for law school, they can’t practice without being admitted. We aren’t all at BigLaw.
Reporting back after the hobby discussion on Monday – I ditched my phone on the charger last night after dinner, set the kids up with coloring pages, and knocked out 600 words of a novel I started working on five years ago. And it was fun! And my four year old asked what I was working on and wanted to draw a picture about it! So I really think that what I thought was a motivation issue, might really be a phone issue and I need to detach myself from it more.
Yay, such a great update! Phone addiction is such a scourge that I’m constantly battling against.
I’ve contributed on those posts and one other thing that occurred to me after reading them was that we often think we need MASSIVE blocks of time to get anything done (and who among us has a massive block of free time?) but you can truly knock out so much with five minutes on a consistent basis. You can also have amazing experiences in just 2-3 minutes – think about Olympians performing for the gold. So many events are literally just 1-2 minutes long, but in those 120 seconds, you can change your entire life. You don’t always need a day or a week or longer to have something be successful, memorable, or meaningful.
Such a great point! I agree. I find that putting the phone in another room (or in a drawer where I can’t see it! it must be out of view; that’s key) suddenly opens up all these possibilities. Sometimes I’ll set a timer for five minutes to journal or read and once I get started, I never want to stop. It’s just the getting started that’s hard because the phone is so glowy and tempting and evilly programmed to make me not want to put it down…
that is such a great update, love it.
I had 13 year old CR-V with 220 miles that I absolutely loved- it even had a good place for my purse instead of a bulky middle console. Traded it in for a two year old Accord Sport that I still don’t like after three months. I can’t see where to park at all. I hate getting in and out of it. And, I hit the bumper backing into my own driveway while being careful. I didn’t like the newer CR-V because they are considerably bigger and I am no longer in the SUV stage of my life. I know I would lose so much money if I traded it back in right now and I don’t even know what I want. Well, I do. I kinda want my old car back. Anyone ever been in this situation?
That is a bummer. If you hate it this much, I’d cut my losses and sell back while resale is still high. Yeah, you’ll lose money, but you’ll lose more a year or two from now.
My parents have done this. I don’t know if it cost them on a trade in, but they were able to take it back in to the dealer and get a car that suited them better. It’s one of those things you use every day and has a big impact on your life—if you can’t stand it, it’s worth getting something that works for you.
Haven’t been there but maybe spend a few hours at carmax test driving? I’ve had good experiences being transparent that I’m not buying and need to see all mini-vans (for example). If you make an appointment they’ll have them ready for you.
+1. I’m short so my primary criteria are whether I can comfortably reach the pedals and whether I can see enough to operate the vehicle. I found it easiest to sit in all the makes and models at CarMax, since most are an immediate no. Then I had a narrow list of cars to check out at dealerships.
FWIW I despise all sedans. I’m happiest in an SUV but usually drive a crossover for financial and environmental reasons. Don’t beat yourself up if you need a taller car for safety reasons.
I’d take the loss and get something you like–you drive every day, don’t be miserable. And I hear you on the not liking it–I’ve driven SUVs my entire life and my husband had an Accord Sport and I absolutely HATED driving it (he has since bought an SUV). It was somehow both longer than my SUV, so parking was more challenging, but also annoyingly low, and I felt like I couldn’t see. When I finally had to replace by 20 year old 4Runner, I got a car that was as close in size to it as I could, which ended up being a Subaru Forester (because 4Runners had gotten much bigger in the intervening 20 years). I probably wouldn’t go back to a 13 year old car just because there have been significant tech/safety upgrades, but I recommend checking out a Forester or a Crosstrek if you liked the size of the old CR-V
I love my Forester!
I still miss my 2005 RAV4 and am unhappy that the “small” SUVs have gotten so much bigger over the years. I also don’t like the way that car windows have gotten so tiny and that hoods have become so sloped that you can’t see where the car ends. For our most recent car we ended up buying a hybrid Corolla Cross, which is somewhat underpowered but is nice and small and has the best visibility of anything we test-drove. You could look at the Lexus version of the Corolla Cross, which is still underpowered but would be quieter.
I don’t think you’d lose quite so much trading in a two-year-old car as you would trading in a three-month-old car.
I need a new time management system. I am feeling like a disorganized mess and I kind of need a fresh start. Early in my career I was a big David Allen Getting Things Done fan, but I tried picking up the book recently and it wasn’t clicking for me like it did in the past. Does any one have other recommendations?
I’ve gotten lots of good tips from Kelly Nolan. Haven’t taken her course, but I’ve learned a lot from the emails and podcast.
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.
The bottom line is that you don’t have enough time in your lifetime to do everything so you need to get rid of unimportant and middling goals and not do those things. Easier said than done, of course, but this book was life changing for me.
Another washer/dryer question:
Our dryer just broke. The appliance guy said it would be a $700 fix on a 15-year-old machine that would maybe give it another 5 years of life, but other parts of both the washer and dryer are likely to break soon too due to age. Also due to age and brand (Blomberg), it is not easy to come by replacement parts anymore. He said if it was his machine, he would replace it.
We live in a tiny space and have a compact washer/dryer stacked vertically. The dryer has an outside vent which the appliance guy recommended keeping since it cuts drying time significantly compared to ventless heat pump models.
It will be tricky to replace just the dryer because of how the two machines connect to our electrical system. Most places will not install just a dryer that is meant to sit on top of a separately-purchased washer. We are not handy at all and don’t want to take that on ourselves.
So we are reluctantly looking to replace both. Any recs for compact models with vented dryers that are good quality and built to last?
If our thinking is completely out of line, also open to feedback on that.