Thursday’s Workwear Report: Lightweight CashSoft Tailored Vest
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Our daily workwear reports suggest one piece of work-appropriate attire in a range of prices.
The Gap CashSoft collection is back again this season with some really lovely, well-priced pieces. My favorite thing I bought from last year was the baby T-shirt (size up!), but this year I’m really liking this little tailored vest. I’m still trying to gather up the courage to lean into the vest trend, but this might be my gateway.
I would probably lean into the '90s look and wear it over a turtleneck or collared shirt, but I’m very interested to hear if folks have better ideas.
The vest is $59.95 full price — take 40% off at checkout — at the Gap and comes in sizes XXS-XXL, ST-XXLT, and XSP-LP. It also comes in terra brown.
Sales of note for 10/9
- Ann Taylor – 40% off must-have styles, and 30% off your full price purchase
- Banana Republic Factory – 40% off everything + extra 25% off
- Boden – 10% off new womenswear styles with code
- The Fold – Up to 25% off with their Workwear Mix and Match offer
- J.Crew – 40% off sitewide
- J.Crew Factory – 40-70% off everything + extra 60% off clearance
- M.M.LaFleur – Fall style event! 25% off $500+, 30% off $750+ — try code CORPORETTE15 for 15% off
- Nordstrom – 1000+ new markdowns!
- Nordstrom Rack – UGG up to 40% off
- Soma -$25 off when you spend $110+, also get a free bra when you buy two
- Talbots – 30% off entire purchase, and free shipping on $150+
What is your best method for taking notes to yourself? I do some of my best thinking in the car, but am still a “pen and paper” notetaker in my daily life and can’t do that while driving. By the time I am home and parked, all those great ideas are gone. Do you send a text to yourself? Record a voice note? For some reason, a really good way to capture those thoughts before they escape is…escaping me.
I used to leave myself voicemails on my work phone.
Can you use Siri to send an email to yourself so you aren’t texting and driving.
“Hey siri, remind me in one hour that I had a great idea about how to double widget production by feeding them lead-filled protein powder”
I bake it into a reminder because by the time I get to my destination, not only has my brain deleted the idea but I’ve forgotten I needed to do anything about it.
=1 hey Siri
I keep a pad and a sharpie in the car. If it’s just a sentence, phone number or couple of words, I just write it down and the sharpie is thick enough that it’s legible even if I’m not looking at the pad.
this is what I do
What is the coolest or most bad@sa thing you’ve done?
Write an international convention (a legally binding one, not a political theater one).
I’m training for a 50k trail run!
Got a c-suite jerk fired.
This is an awesome question! I made a list about two years ago when I was going through a career transition, dealing with perimenopause, and generally needed a reminder that I can do hard and/or scary things.
Bad-@ss things I’ve done: summited Mt. Kilimanjaro, snowboarded from Switzerland into Italy and back again on the same day, cuddled 300lb tigers, jumped out of a helicopter in flight without a parachute (over water), swam with 200lb sharks without a cage, roasted marshmallows over lava on an active volcano, was a stagehand for a Hard-Core music festival, was decorated for valor during military combat action, bareback rode and cared for an adolescent elephant, was a wrestling coach for two seasons, completed a 100km ultra-marathon while drinking beer, traveled to 13 foreign countries while pregnant with my kiddo.
Some of these things are travel adventures and I realize I am very fortunate to have had the opportunity. It’s nice to have a list of bad-@ss things you’re proud of when life slows down or when you’re feeling insecure.
Professionally, wrote the entire research brief that was submitted as an exhibit in a human rights case before a country’s Supreme Court. We won.
Personally, maybe skiing Alta Chutes and Expert Chutes at Jackson Hole when I was 13-14 or cat skiing in the backcountry around that age. Skiing is my number one way to feel fast, powerful, and like an unencumbered version of myself.
Gave a brief presentation to a committee that included a Nobel Prize winner with a reputation for curmudgeonliness. It went very well, my boss burbled to me afterwards about how pleased he was.
Started my career as an admin for a team in my industry and worked my way up, eventually making Managing Director and earning over $1m in my best year in a man’s world. Took 16 years. I can’t tell a lot of people about the full scope of my trajectory – I don’t like to flaunt my income at all. But I’m damn proud of it.
Designed a rescue plan for a friend who was enmeshed in a bad relationship with an abusive criminal. When I presented it to her, it made it clear that I, and many of our mutual friends, were completely committed to her safety, even if it meant we would potentially cross a lot of legal boundaries. It woke her up to her relationship issues, and she ended up leaving. It took several months before she was completely free, and years later I would still get occasional visits from his employees making threats. Still totally worth it.
Got a manager demoted and eventually let go.
I love this one so much.
Joined the OA along with 8 of my girl BSA / Scouting America scouts. Scouting led me, committed office worker and couch sitter, to what is becoming a second / weekend career in wilderness first aid.
Some pretty cool (to me) athletic endeavors (trail races and triathlons and cool hikes) and solo travel.
I also wrote my city’s COVID reopening guidance.
I’ve seen Garnet Hill recommended here and now I’m eyeing a dress there. How is the quality and how does the sizing run? I’ve been trying to buy fewer, more classic and better quality pieces so would like this to last several seasons.
I think the sizing runs a little small/classic. I’ve only bought their merino cardigans and one dress. For the cardigans, while I would take a small in Loft or Banana Factory, a medium was better from GH. For dresses, I’m usually a 4-6 in those brands, but needed and 8, or maybe even a 10 from GH (I bought their lace dress that is kind of a mild a-line shape. The 8 fit, but a 10 might also have worked).
Also curious, but I suspect the sizing isn’t going to quite work for me (taller and longer-limbed than average).
What’s your favorite way to brush up or start learning a language before travel?
This summer I’ll be on a hiking trip in France, Austria, and Italy. Since I’ll be in more rural areas, I don’t think that English will be as prevalent as it is in major cities, nor will I have great connectivity to look up language.
I took French from middle school through college (I minored in it), but was never fluent. I’ve done Duolingo and Rosetta Stone intermittently since college (10 years ago) but I’m definitely rusty. I’m better at reading/writing than I am at speaking and listening.
I’d LOVE to become conversational in French again.
I also want to learn some basic Italian and German to get by.
I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’m a big fan of Pimsleur. The focus is on speaking and pronunciation, and the concept is that you listen to one lesson per day, which involves listening and speaking. In my experience the focus is on much more useful words/phrases than duolingo. It’s also easier for me to fit in because i’ll listen to it when I’m cooking or driving.
+1
Watch TV in the language! For French, I would watch Dix pour Cent or L’Agence. You can do subtitles, ideally in the language but in English at first.
As a supplement to what you learn in the interim, you can download languages for offline use in Google Tr-slate (for free).
Pimsleur is perfect for this. Focus on speaking and listening, and the types of phrases you need for travel. I’ll also say, as someone who lives in a German speaking country, and started with Pimsleur – I was much better at speaking that most of my classmates who started with Duolingo or just classes.
Stream news in those languages. My spouse does this and there are several languages that I have started to pick up just by overhearing them regularly.
There used to be a site called “slow news in French” or “news in slow French” so that someone learning French could listen better. Not sure if this is still a thing or what other languages they have or if it is now an app or what
Also re-learning French and I like news in slow French! I also like “Languatalk slow French: learn French with Gaëlle”
Duolingo is not ideal (would prefer more emphasis on listening to longer exchanges and proper pronunciation), but it has been helpful for reminding me of little grammatical things I knew from HS French and forgot
RFI publishes Le Journal en Francais Facile, a 10-min daily news podcast. It’s excellent for current news vocab. Follow French influencers on Insta for more casual vibes – Ophelie is a good one
Listen to music and sing along for help with pronounciation
My go to is a couple bottles of wine and a weekend with French movies on netflix. Wine helps with being less annoyed at the subtitle decisions. Also, I’d just focus on French as between English and French, you should be fine getting by.
I like Coffee Break French which has tons of seasons & they do other languages. I just found Inner French from this board as well. Both are podcasts.
I’ve been using Coffee Break Spanish to brush up and it’s been great. I actually started in season 2 because I didn’t need the basics in season 1 and it worked out very well.
For those with a birthday near christmas, how did you celebrate as a child and what do you think your parents did right or wrong? I have a christmas-adjacent birthday child and trying to not breed resentment…
Things we have done:
-celebrated a half birthday instead (this was a disaster as by the time her birthday rolled around 6 months later, the memory of the half-birthday party had faded).
– delayed decorating the house for christmas until after her birthday (a lot of work and maybe unnecessary?)
– Had a slightly later or earlier party (this one seems necessary because there are so many holiday activities happening in December half her friends are booked).
– never combined a birthday and chirstmas present (this from my own experience as a january baby)
Other thoughts?
I’m 3 days before Christmas so decorations were up which I quite liked. I normally had my party the first week of December, so it wouldn’t get lost in the holiday shuffle but I definitely felt like baby Jesus stole my thunder as a kid. Although sometimes my uncle would dress up as Santa and come to my parties? But I got a lot of combination presents, forgotten birthdays. Also, my parents were generally rubbish birthday people. The most incredible loving parents, but this is their one failing (which feels minor now!).
As an adult, I now have a birthday formula – sushi lunch, trip to the bookshop, vegan chocolate cake with my husband and son in mid-December. We typically head to my parents’ on the 20th or so every year and just do a cake there.
There’s nothing you can do about breeding resentment. They’ll (me!) always be upset that they can never have a pool party and most of their friends are away.
My birthday is between Christmas and NYE, so my experience is different than that of your child, but putting up Christmas decorations is probably fine. But yes, maybe do the birthday party a bit earlier in December and then celebrate her real birthday with a nice dinner and cake (invite her friends over casually if they are around for cake and icecream.)
For what it’s worth, I never bother celebrating my birthday anymore, and neither does anyone else I know with birthdays in this timeframe. Probably just a cost of being a Sag/Capricorn.
As a summer birthday I could have had a pool party, but EVERYONE was always away so I had to do early or belated parties too
This makes me want to celebrate the real birthday with a nice dinner and cake and also with a pool party when friends are in town.
My birthday is in December and my daughter’s birthday is a week after mine so I’m very sensitive to this. To complicate matters, my husband is Jewish and DD’s birthday often overlaps with Hanukkah. I’m interested in the suggestions because I felt like my birthday was glossed over as a kid (too busy for a birthday party, gifts combined with Christmas) and as an adult have compensated by going on vacations over my bday. I’m also trying to make sure DD’s birthdays are special.
What I’ve done for her:
-Separate birthday and Christmas gifts (and Hanukkah gifts from the in laws)
-Birthday celebration that day or next weekend
As she gets older we can evaluate an earlier or later party. In high school and college mine was tough bc it always fell around finals so no one really wanted to hang out for long.
I’m not going to delay putting up Christmas decorations. I prefer to do that right after Thanksgiving and leave them up until close to New Years. I’ve thought about the half birthday concept and some of our friends with December babies do that, but I think that will just make her want two parties.
I’m a late December baby and we have 3 family birthdays between 12/24 and 12/31.
– always use birthday wrapping paper on birthday presents
– celebrate the fact that you never need to work or go to school on your birthday! (Amazing if applicable).
– always have a birthday cake, even if your house is already full of a million Christmas cookies and now also 3 birthday cakes
– make a birthday a big deal! Do something special for your birthday, going to a fun place, do this activity, whatever. Not like, ‘we are hanging at grandmas house this week so that’s what your birthday is’ or ‘we always ski this week’. Make the day stand out from season. – If you have to wait until January for a friend birthday I think that’s fine, as long as the birthday day itself is also special.
+1 to all of this as a new years baby. My friends were usually out of town over winter break so my official birthday party was the first weekend after school restarted.
Plan your kid’s actual birthday as if it weren’t around the holidays. I resented that for years my parents hosted an open house on my birthday with a lot of extended family I barely knew. They claimed it was fun and festive. As a kid I had zero interest in spending my birthday with whatever great aunt or second cousin they felt obligated to invite.
My son’s (approaching 13!) has a birthday a week before Christmas, and he’s always said it’s not an issue. We don’t delay Christmas stuff at all, but we have always tried to make sure to carve out time for his birthday specifically. We don’t combine presents, but in recent years as he’s been more interested in big things, he’s suggested combining so he can get a big thing he really wants.
Long story short, it doesn’t seem a bit of a problem to him, but it is a continuous pain for us, since it makes December a bit more hairy to plan things, and it would be nicer to spread out the big present times. We’re past the party era now, but it was hard when he was younger to find a weekend that worked well, though, again, it always worked out somehow.
Hot take – if you’ve made a good faith effort and done some of the great suggestions from this thread and resentment continues, it’s time for a lesson in gratitude and not even more effort.
The resentment has nothing to do with parental efforts. It’s just a part of your life you know is different than what other people experience. Chill.
Do you ordinarily decorate for birthdays in your family? if so, I’d go ahead and do whatever normal decorations you usually do for birthdays for whatever time frame you decorate for other family members (a day? a week?), and do your normal Christmas decorations for the whole season. Her birthday is an important family day, I wouldn’t turn it into a whole season in itself (unless you celebrate a whole season of birthday events for the rest of the family).
I have a friend whose birthday is 12/26. To make matters worse, he is a twin!
AI makes me so ragey, I have a lot of colleagues who use it and every time I get an email they clearly didn’t write themselves I feel compelled to ignore it. AI often gets the details wrong in our highly technical field, but it’s okay the formatting is nice and there are em dashes 🙄
When I see em dashes I automatically know the content is more likely to be wrong than right. I brace myself and cringe knowing how much time I will have to spend dealing with the misguided and ignorant take.
I’m a prolific em dash user. And I don’t care if people assume my stuff is written with AI, because the em dash is a top tier punctuation mark.
I knew all these colleagues before AI and they do not have any sort of command over punctuation.
This always baffles me. I know you suddnely didn’t gain 30 IQ points overnight people. A junior colleague recently sent something that sounded impressive but was technical word salad. We had a chat after that about how AI is acceptable internally (within limits) but the expectation is to review it, not just send blindly.
Agree– I use them all the time!
Did AI write this comment?
(Kidding, but I’ll fight you on the best and worst punctuation marks. Exclamation points are the worst.)
I’m in-house counsel in a highly regulated industry and questions from the field increasingly include “I ran my question through chatGPT and this is what it said!”
I despair.
shrug, I like em dashes! But there is a very specific generic words-blur-together “uncanny valley” vibe to AI-assisted emails.
I’ve been using em dashes for decades at this point, and now I worry that people will think I used chatgpt to write stuff. Le sigh.
Help finding inexpensive but custom sized book shelves or other storage? We have a ton of board games. They’ve outgrown DH’s old trunk where they used to live. The trunk is in a nook behind/next to the fireplace. I’d like to get a bookshelf (or something else?) to fit that space. I’ve looked online for something with the dimensions I need (50x28x48) but I haven’t found anything deep enough. I’m willing to spend like $500 for something that works, but I have a hard time justifying spending more for a piece that’s mostly hidden. Any suggestions?
Do you want help justifying it? I mean, it’s hidden now but the jumble of board games will draw the eye and will look better and I am assuming it is a movable bookcase, not a built-in so you can move it to a more prominent visible place later.
Or do an IKEA Billy in the wood color you want or paint it.
FB Marketplace, scroll through all the antiques.
If you are handy, you could build your own shelves to fit the nook.
Oh we did this for a nook behind the door. Our DIY solution was to order wood cut in the exact right size and use those triangle shelf brackets. I painted them in fun colours and they work really well.
Shopping help please! I need to wear a “single strand pearl necklace” with a black formal dress for a concert. My go-to dress has a low v neck, which doesn’t work with my choker pearl necklace.
No help, but hello fellow chorister!
Hiiii!
Can you shorten it so it’s a high neck choker?
Online – pearl paradise or Costco. In person – my local estate jeweler is flooded with pearls, the antique ones they have are larger/cheaper than what I could buy new.
If you have long hair and a pearl necklace you already like, you could consider a necklace extender. There are a ton of options online and are pretty inexpensive.
+1 to this if you already have a strand. Even a silk or velvet ribbon could look nice for this.
OP here – that’s a good idea! I’ll play around with a ribbon or extender.
You’re wanting to buy a new dress, or a new necklace?
Necklace
I mean do you want it to be high quality or just appear compliant when viewed from the audience? Because JCrew Factory has one for $22.
Good morning! Has anyone had any experience with Boardsi? A friend was asking me about it and I’d never heard of it. I did some searching and it seems like a little bit of a scam, but wanted to see if anyone had some experience with it?
What temperature do you set the thermostat in your house and how do you feel about it? Are you cold? Warm? Comfortable?
It is 50 degrees outside and ours is set at 68. I’m very cold but we never really set it higher and I like keeping our electric bill low. It might be time to give in.
Ideally, it’s 74 inside year round. I can easily deal with it being much warmer inside (fans), but I chill easily, especially if not moving around. It’s like I’m a stealth hypothyroid person.
We keep ours at 68 as well. I have an older home and have accepted that I’m going to be cold from November-April in New England. I wear lots of vests, slippers, we keep blankets on all couches/beds, and my sons/husband are generally baffled as to why I’m freezing.