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Updated: Dec 21, 2020 80 Comments · by

Suit of the Week: Hugo Boss

Suit of the Week | · ·

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5/24/24 Update: The Nordstrom Half-Yearly Sale has started — see our big sale roundup! Also, sign up for our newsletter to stay on top of all the great sales!

nordstrom half yearly sale for women 2018 - workwear and suiting for women

For busy working women, the suit is often the easiest outfit to throw on in the morning. In general, this feature is not about interview suits for women, which should be as classic and basic as you get — instead, this feature is about the slightly different suit that is fashionable, yet professional.

I'm allllmost done with my big roundup of the Nordstrom Half Yearly Sale for workwear… in the meantime, do note that there are a ton of Hugo Boss suits on sale.

This “cozy grey melange fantasy” has all four pieces still in stock in a good range of sizes — some of the other ones we've featured recently are also on sale. (In fact, everything we've featured recently that is now part of the NHYS sale is tagged here.)

They still aren't cheap, of course — the jacket and dress are both marked down to $418, the skirt is $224, and the pants are $231.

Sales of note for 10.10.24

  • Nordstrom – Extra 25% off clearance (through 10/14); there's a lot from reader favorites like Boss, FARM Rio, Marc Fisher LTD, AGL, and more. Plus: free 2-day shipping, and cardmembers earn 6x points per dollar (3X the points on beauty).
  • Ann Taylor – Extra 50% off sale (ends 10/12)
  • Banana Republic Factory – Up to 50% off everything plus extra 25% off your $125+ purchase
  • Boden – 10% off new styles with code; free shipping over $75
  • Eloquii – Extra 50% off a lot of sale items, with code
  • J.Crew – 40% off sitewide
  • J.Crew Factory – 50% off entire site, plus extra 25% off orders $150+
  • Lo & Sons – Fall Sale, up to 35% off
  • M.M.LaFleur – Save 25% sitewide
  • Neiman Marcus – Sale on sale, up to 85% off
  • Spanx – Lots of workwear on sale, some up to 70% off
  • Talbots – 50% off 2+ markdowns
  • Target – Circle week, deals on 1000s of items
  • White House Black Market – Buy one, get one – 50% off full price styles

And some of our latest threadjacks here at Corporette (reader questions and commentary) — see more here!

Some of our latest threadjacks include:

About Kat

Kat Griffin is the founder, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Corporette. You can read more about her here.

Comments

  1. Ellen

    I LOVE Hugo Boss, Kat, and this suit will be perfect for me in Grey. I also love the Grey cami, b/c it shields me from Frank’s peering pencil and he can’t see a thing! I would get the skirt, but NEVER the pant’s, and I just got approval from the manageing partner! Thanks for making it so simple, Kat!

  2. Anonymous

    So I’ve seen mention on here of having break-out issues when you start using retin-A like Differin. How long does that normally last and when you do you decide it’s not working for you? I’ve been using Differin for about a month now and have been having way worse than normal break outs, especially cystic acne on my chin, but also smaller zits on my upper lip, along my smile lines, and around my nose. Even if it helps my wrinkles, I’m about ready to give up. Is this normal?

    • Veronica Mars

      Mine went on for about 3 months and then it completely cleared up, but that was with Differin. Retin-A gave me absolutely no breakouts (although granted, that was after I’d gotten through the worst of Differin and was out the other side). I think this kind of irritation is normal and I’d stick it out if I were you.

      • Anonymous

        Thanks. I hate the idea of going through another 2 months of it, but that was my biggest question – how long I should stick it out before thinking it wasn’t working. Sounds like I should go a bit longer…

    • Anon

      Purging is normal, but I’d also make sure your other skincare is addressing the dryness that comes with it, as that can lead to breakouts too

  3. Anonymous

    I love Hugo Boss, but man I wish they would work on the proportions of their suit jackets. They’re always too long to be worn with a dress. Even this one looks too long on the model and I’m sure she’s quite a bit taller than I am (5’2″).

  4. BigLaw Sr Assoc

    What do people think about wearing this color of a suit to court? I usually stick with darker colors, but I see men wearing similar colors. Unfortunately there are not too many women in courts where I usually go.

  5. Anonymous

    So Fidelity posted guidelines (which aren’t new) about having 1x your salary saved by age 30, 2x by age 35 etc (for retirement). It got picked up by various media on twitter and 30-35 year olds are losing their minds with the blame game of how it isn’t possible because no one is paid enough, loans are huge etc. What the heck are people taking such huge loans to study? I had loans too — which I knew “restricted” my choices to finance, law (followed by a big firm) or medicine (followed by a specialty). My parents never expressly said it, but I imagine if I was going to take 6 figure loans to study a liberal art which would lead to starting an office job at 40-60k with 100k in loans, they would have spoken up and pretty much not allowed it. For those here who took out big loans, did you consider your income potential or was it simply — this is what I want?

    • Anonymous

      I’m 32, in big law, and have no where near $260k (my current income) saved. If you include retirement accounts, H and I have about $200k saved, but I still have over $100k in debt. So it’s not just people who got liberal arts degrees.

      • Anonymous

        Agree that these timelines are ambitious. At 30 I definitely did not have 1x salary for retirement given that I started biglaw at 26 after clerking and then 2008-09 happened just 2 years later. I prob didn’t get to 1x until 35. But IDK I think they’re guidelines so I never felt like you HAVE to meet them exactly on time as long as there’s forward progress.

      • Anonymous

        I think it may also be easier to save if you’re not big law, but make enough to max out your 401(k). I’m 38, make just over $200K, and have over $500K in my 401(k), but I (a) got the benefit of the market turn past the rescission), and (b) have maxed out my 401(K) every year since I was 25. My salary isn’t the highest on the board, but I’ve saved the max I can in that account.

    • Anonymous

      If you’re only making $40k out of college, then $40k in debt (which is arguably a reasonable amount of debt to take on for undergrad) can take a long time to pay off. Even if you are aggressive, it could take 5-10 years.

    • Anonymous

      I mean I studied law too but I graduated at 26 with close to 200k in debt. Even going into Big Law there was no way I was going to have my annual salary saved at 30, and since I left Big Law and went in house and then had a family and have to pay $2k per month for daycare, I don’t have 2x my annual salary saved at 35. I’m not that far off and we plan to start saving a lot more and hopefully catch up once our kids are in public school but it’s not just “lolz those silly liberal arts majors”.

      • Anon

        Exactly.

        It’s not like the world is compromised of people who are dumb and take out $100k in loans for an anthropology degree, and those who took out $150k to go to Georgetown Law and sailed into a BigLaw job. Plenty of people who took out loans for great law schools and did well didn’t have careers work out. Heavens, Megan McArdle went to UChicago for her MBA and couldn’t get a decent paying job for years.

    • Anonymous

      I graduated law school at 31 with $100k in debt. My first job – a meaningful gov’t job that I was in love with – paid $60k – barely enough for me to make the interest payments, never mind the principal. Only now, 5 years later, have I been able to start making extra payments to make a dent in the principal.

    • Anonymous

      These guidelines exist in various forms. They’re meant to account for number of years working as well. 2x income at 35 is meant for someone who graduated college at 22. So for a lawyer it’d be 2x income at 38, for a dr even later.

    • Anonymous

      Wow, could you be more privileged? I laughed at that article. I’m 33 and only recently started to be able to afford a somewhat decent lifestyle. I barely have a savings account.

      Very, very few people are fortunate enough to graduate debt-free, or have parental support, or the support and opportunity to go to med school or business school, or whatever. If you only read this s!te you might think it’s common for most Americans to make good salaries. It is not.

      • Anonymous

        Why not? If you’re taking loans for college why can’t you study finance or accounting or engineering for undergrad which “guarantee” a fairly well paid job rather than rolling the dice with women’s studies? This has nothing to do with support for business or med school.

          • Anonymous

            So it’s better to be bogged down with 75k in debt at graduation with a 40k job not knowing how you’ll make it work because at least you were happy for 4 years? Cool. Makes sense.

          • Anonymous

            Anonymous at 4:39, get off your high horse. I am so sorry that your early life was traumatic to the point that you didn’t develop empathy for others. Either that, or I am sorry you were born a sociopath. You may be doing well financially, but eventually your callousness will catch up to you and make you miserable, believe me. You still have time to change your ways if you want to avoid a bleak, loveless future. Best of luck to you.

        • Anon

          OK, I’ll bite. I didn’t take loans for college, rather worked two jobs and didn’t sleep for 4 years. It sucked and I had zero “college experience”. With benefit of hindsight, I’m 99% sure my grades and quality of life would have been much better had I taken some debt, though I don’t think my job prospects would have been much improved. I ended up taking my degree in music, because it was something I could do without a ton of studying. I had to drop my STEM major because I simply couldn’t study and focus to the degree necessary to do well with a night job and 3 hours of sleep. I had to major in something I could do on autopilot in order to get a college diploma which, while not in a super-useful major, is still a college degree. Even if I’d finished the STEM major, I didn’t feel like I’d be a shoo-in for any job that paid enough to justify debt, and I had no family support/involvement.

          • Anon

            Also, I had more than 2x my salary by 35, and about 6x now at 40, but that’s because my salary is nothing to write home about and also, I spent those early years working my fingers to the bone knowing that I had nothing to fall back on but what I manage to put up if something went sideways (and crappy employers who were more than happy to exploit that fact). The downside to that is there was no time or leftover energy for a relationship, starting a family, etc. Bit of a crappy confluence of events, but it is what it is and hopefully I’m a bit the better for it now.

        • CPA Lady

          That makes sense now, but when I was a teenager, my parents provided zero career guidance. Neither did my husband’s. This was 15 years ago when “go to college and Follow Your Dreams!” was a thing that was being sold to high school students and their parents as a viable life plan. I would absolutely encourage my own child to pick a major where she’ll be able to get a job that can support her. Dream following is for people with trust funds. If I had it to do over, I would have skipped the fancy liberal arts college with the quirky traditions and my liberal arts major and gone to to state school for an accounting degree. (Or at least taken as many finance and business classes as I could at the fancy liberal arts college). But that was not the advice I was given as a teenager leafing through college guides and staring with heart shaped eyes at old stone buildings covered in ivy thinking that going to college was for “the experience” or whatever. The place I went to college also really heavily marketed the idea that liberal arts majors will be hired anywhere because they know how to think and write.

          As far as the broader issue of people in my generation finding it impossible to save for retirement, timing is also an issue. A lot of us graduated around the worst part of the recession. No one was hiring. My husband went back to school for a “useful” degree and we scraped by on my 25k a year salary for a couple of years. He started a full time professional job as I went back to school for my CPA classes and was working part time as a bookkeeper for $9 an hour. It’s hard to make a lot of progress in that situation.

          My husband and I didn’t both get our education finished and our careers started until we were in our late 20s. Thank god we didn’t have a lot of student loans or move somewhere expensive, or we’d still be underwater in our mid 30s. We currently have a HHI of $150k in a LCOL with no debt other than our house. As it is, we’re in a very good and secure place compared to most people in this country. Our retirement savings is about where it needs to be according to that metric. But I look around at a lot of my peers and get the feeling that they were sold the same “follow your dreams, don’t worry about the cost, it’ll work out!” bill of goods that I was.

          • pugsnbourbon

            +1. I was high-achieving and fell for follow your dreams, too. Not much in the way of parental $$$ support, thankfully I went to a public instead of a private university which covered tuition. Finished undergrad in 2009 – that was a great time, remember?

            My wife and I are doing fine now, but a large portion of this micro-generation has struggled. Even those with STEM degrees.

        • Anonymous

          A lot of lawyers don’t make big law money. Most, in fact. I think most people go to law school think they will be making lots of money, most of them make less than they planned, at least at first.

          I graduated law school in 2008 when people were getting their offers rescinded but I went in at the peak of the law school bubble. So a lot of this is hard even if you do make sensible choices in life. Try to realize how lucky you are if you really don’t get it.

          • Anonymous

            Btw – I was lucky enough to graduate college debt free but I still ended up with about $90K of loans for 3 years of law school, and that’s with a partial scholarship all three years!

          • Rainbow Hair

            We’re similar, and graduated the same year. All of us had offers in 2007, but I’m the only one of my friends from law school (one of the top schools, which seems relevant) who had a job after graduation — it was just dumb luck that my firm was in a good position to blah blah blah after everything went to hell. I’ve been luckier than a lot of people from start (a combination of privilege and dumb luck saw me graduating undergrad without debt) to finish (paid off my law school debt by working biglaw and sharing a studio apartment with my boyfriend), and those guidelines still seem beyond my reach.

          • Ellen

            I was also a victim of the GREAT RESCESSION, as it is called. Alot of jobs were lost and I was forced to serve supeenies for years, even tho I WAS admitted to the Bar. Men did not care, and would just pinch my tuchus as if I were a college freshman, when I had a JD from GW, no less. FOOEY on those men now that I am successful and a partner in a WC Boutique firm. I’ll bet they wish they MARRIED me now!

        • Anonymous

          Nothing “guarantees” a high paying job, as many people who graduated with a law degree in 2008 know.

          • Anonymous

            Nothing is a guarantee but some things are closer to a guarantee than others, let’s be honest.

          • Anonymous

            That’s certainly what law schools want you to think. It’s not true. I still make less than a first year big law lawyer, 7 years in.

        • Anon

          Because most people in college can’t do engineering – they simply lack the math skills.

    • Anon

      Every scientist I know finds this laughable, not because we necessarily have a lot of debt, but because training takes so long. I didn’t get a “real” job until 33, many people are closer to 40. So I’m now 39 and savings are more than 3x our salaries, but at 30 I had essentially no savings and at 35 it might have been 1x salary.

    • anony

      I wonder if you will learn empathy or if you will have a self-righteous attitude throughout your life, looking down on those who are in difficult situations.

      I definitely considered income potential, but it still takes years to pay off significant loans from graduate school. Life is expensive, even if you live like a monk and have a side hustle.

    • Anonymous

      I wonder if part of the reason people take out so much in loans is because of the way we talk about them. The figure discussed is always the principal borrowed, not the amount you can expect to pay if you make all payments timely. That figure gets ignored. $40,000 in student debt at 6.8% (current federal rate) on a 15 year payment plan is actually closer to $65,000. We do this with housing too. A $500,00 30 year fixed rate loan at 4.5% (a reasonable rate in the current market) is much closer to a million dollars once actually paid.

      • Anonymous

        That and kids just don’t “get” money. It sounds like fun money when they hear 100k or 200k debt. But how many can work thru and realize what starting pay is, how much you bring home after taxes/insurance, how much you need to pay in rent/utilities and then can you service the monthly debt payment?

      • Anonymous

        At the same time, if post-secondary school costs $40k and you or your parents don’t have that waiting in a bank account, what do you do? If you live in a HCOL area where it costs $500k to even enter the market, and the rent on a 2-bedroom apartment is more than the payment on a $500k mortgage, what do you do? I think people often do understand these things but feel hamstrung without good options to choose from.

      • Anonymous

        I agree with this. Personally I have no clue how much I’ll end up actually paying on my loans, it definitely was not disclosed on any of my loan paperwork. The banks like to hide this information.

        I’m not sure that student and home loans are all that comparable though. At least your mortgage interest is tax deductible (so far). It’s a little trickier to figure out what you actually paid for your house considering that your interest was paid with pre-tax dollars. And of course you’re always going to need somewhere to live and that will cost money – whether you buy, rent, or pay property taxes on the paid-off family estate. So how much of that $$ is just the cost of living in this society? Idk.

        In any event I think student loans are more analogous to credit card debt. If you’re just paying the minimum you’re going to end up paying much more than the original loan, but society seems to have this mental block about talking about how much things actually cost if you buy them on credit.

    • Anonymous

      To answer the narrow question — I’m Indian (and no my parents didn’t pay for my full education, they just couldn’t), so Dream following wasn’t an option. The options were medicine; finance (because we’re in NJ so parents saw Wall Street riches); law; engineering, in that order. Fortunately it’s a “relaxed” family so my siblings had I were all allowed to pick from that list — as opposed to friends shoved into med school with no interest in it. So I did finance undergrad plus law. I’m just over 35 and boy am I grateful that our only options were these types of professions. Though I wanted to do business/law myself; guess I’d be a lot unhappier if I dreamt of music or teaching only to be pushed into law or finance.

    • Anonymous

      I took out big, unrealistic loans for a BA degree that started me out at $40-60K. My (single) mom didn’t speak up because she didn’t know anything about the process and I am a first-generation college grad. I was pretty panicked when I realized how limited my budget and opportunities were going to be with that debt when I graduated in the middle of the great recession. I ended up taking out even more loans to go to law school a few years later since I got into a really good program and could count on a biglaw job. Now I’m paying everything off thanks to that biglaw salary.

      Honestly, I really wish my high school guidance counselor would have helped me make my college decision. Instead he laughed me off when I said my family couldn’t contribute to my education (I was one of very few lower income students at my high school and I guess he just didn’t believe me). Luckily there’s a lot more information out there for students to make an informed decision about school loans than there was when I was making the decision in 2004.

      And yea, I definitely don’t have that much saved in retirement. My law school loans are 8% interest, so I’m knocking those out first and just contributing what is automatically taken out of my check to retirement for now. I live super frugally and will have all my undergrad and law school loans (over $250K) paid off within 4 years of graduating law school.

    • Cc

      Yes I considered my income. When I entered law school (t14) 96 percent of graduates left with a 6 figure job. Summer associate classes at Goodwin proctor in Boston for example was 100 people. After my first year the economy crashed. That summer Goodwin took I believe 10 people for their summer class. At least 30 percent of my class did not have jobs at graduation and many more took much lower paying jobs. 35 year olds were extremely impacted by the recession

      • Anonymous

        I’m the same class, also in Boston. I ended up in BigLaw (in a summer program that was a tiny fraction of the size of the year before). I knew many, many classmates at my T20 school who never actually practiced law — they took JD Preferred jobs or went back to the careers they came from.

    • Anonymous

      It’s not as simple as just “studying law/engineering/finance/medicine etc.” Let’s do the math… yes, there are lots of jobs that pay $100,000 available to people who have a BS in engineering. But those jobs tend to be in cities like Silicon Valley, Seattle and Boston… very very expensive places to live. $100,000 really doesn’t go that far in those places, especially if you’re single and don’t have someone to share household expenses with, which most 20-somethings are. $100,000 is maybe $65,000 after taxes? So that’s a take home pay of just over $5,000/month. A decent studio apartment or room in a larger apartment in these cities can easily be $2,000/month. Loan payments can easily be $1,000 even if you went to a state school. That leaves just a little over $2,000 for all your other expenses, including a car payment, renter’s insurance, utilities, gas and groceries. Honestly, I think someone living on that salary in one of those cities would be doing incredibly well to be saving $500/month. And saving $500/month ($6,000/year) for eight years doesn’t get you anywhere close to your annual salary.

      Law and medicine typically pay a lot more than $100,000 at the highest levels, but they have way more years of training and working in low paying jobs. A law school grad won’t start earning the big bucks until 25 at the earliest and med school is usually more like age 28-30, and these grads typically have far more debt than someone who just did a bachelor’s in engineering or business. Most lawyers and doctors I know have a negative net worth at 30 and have just recently started breaking even at age 35.

      • Anonymous

        This is kind of tough to think about, but I’ve worked with students a lot, and not everyone can just “work hard” enough to succeed in STEM. It’s especially rough when a student achieved great grades in math and science until college (because their high schools or even 2 year colleges weren’t comparably rigorous). The “med school or bust” students who aren’t actually competitive really suffer with this realization. And it’s not as though the straight-A STEM majors all get great jobs when they graduate. I don’t want to think about what the prospects are like for the students who couldn’t get into a selective institution in the first place.

    • Anonymous

      Please remember that guidelines like this greatly benefit financial companies, who collect investment fees off of people putting money in retirement. I view this as similar to guidance that people *need* $3 million to retire. That assumption is based on some ideas about how people spend their income in retirement that don’t jibe with how most retirees live. It also assumes that you are going to live off interest and leave the principal to your heirs. I work with retirees; few of them had $3 mill when they retired and not all have pensions/defined benefit plans to draw from either. The sad reality is that health problems and general slow-down mean most retirees aren’t taking African safaris and hiking the Alps. Even my healthy clients don’t want to do those things.

      I’m not saying saving isn’t important, and it’s better to save too much than too little, obviously. But I am highly suspicious of the advice given out by financial companies around how much people should save for retirement. Fidelity has skin in that game. When you have a large number of assets invested with them, they benefit from it. I prefer to take my financial advice from fixed-fee advisers. Just like I would rather ask my doctor which drugs I should be taking, an not a pharmaceutical rep.

  7. DC Bachelorette

    Suggestions for an event location for bachelorette in the DC/NOVA area in September? We are planning to do our own thing, not go out, but need a space to do it. (Think games and dancing and pizza.) We have thought about just getting a hotel suite and having people spread out and hang out there. Any suggestions in a similar price range to a hotel? Events hall? Any restuarants with a great private room? (Need room for 20 people to be moving around and dancing and having a good time.)

    • Beth

      Little Coco’s in Petworth has a great roof deck (and pizza!) and a very reasonable food and beverage minimum ($500).

    • Ellen

      You could rent out space at Georgetown Center! I used to love that place b/c of all the food establishemnt’s, but I have not been back for years. Men used to be all over me there b/c they loved me in my sundress (with many schmoes begging me to take it off too) FOOEY on them. I would NEVER do that kind of thing, but it was flatering for men to fawn all over me when I was svelte. Now I am just short with nice boobies but a big tuchus. That I have found is NOT enough to attract, let alone retain, a decent man. FOOEY! Once I figure out the combination that I need, I will be heading for the next Express train to Chapaqua! YAY!!!!!

  8. career advice

    Any advice, suggestions, warnings, etc., for an aspiring appellate attorney? I’m in a clerkship at the moment and I’m trying to work through next steps. I am tentatively worried about pigeonholing myself when I haven’t experienced trial work, and I’ve also heard that there are career advancement challenges for attorneys that specialize in appellate work in particular. But I am confident that I would be very happy spending my career doing this type of work. Any thoughts?

    • Anonymous

      There can be very interesting appellate jobs at the state government level, particularly as an appellate public defender or appellate prosecutor. The pay may not be the highest, but from what I hear, the work can be challenging and rewarding.

      • Anonymous

        nononono — in my area these attorneys are not great (they are awful). find an appellate boutique that is well-respected and trust your gut.

  9. Reluctant cougar

    Can/should I date a coworker who is 13 years younger and just starting out? I feel an incredible (read: I have never experienced this kind of) chemistry and connection and I think it goes both ways.

    • Anon

      No. You should not. Because they are your coworker, because they are ‘just starting out’, and because you only think it goes both ways. How many women have been on the other side of this… you should not.

      • Anonymous

        This is a little unfair… she said coworker not subordinate. She certainly shouldn’t harass him but just because someone is more junior doesn’t make a workplace romance automatically inappropriate.
        That said my answer is still no because a relationship with some 13 years younger is unlikely to be serious and I don’t think workplace flings are a good idea.

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