ByKat Hours Updated
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Suit of the Week: Ann Taylor

Black woman wears navy suit with white top; the blazer is a cutaway blazer

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. Also: we just updated our big roundup for the best women's suits of 2023!

I know Elizabeth just featured a gorgeous Ann Taylor dress this morning, but I just realized Ann Taylor is having a great flash sale: today only, everything is 50% off plus free shipping.

And while Ann Taylor has a lot of great seasonal, fun suits, I feel like it's still pretty rare that you see this big of a discount on all of the suits, including their Seasonless Stretch and Bi-Stretch suiting.

The pictured suit is part of their Bi-Stretch suiting; the model is wearing the cutaway blazer but there are a few different blazers that match as well as a skirt, two dresses, and several pants fits.

For Bi-Stretch suiting, prices are $98-198 full price, but 50% off means everything comes down to $49-$99.

Psst: we've talked about which Ann Taylor suiting line is best, and rounded up reader favorites to buy at Ann Taylor.

Sales of note for 12.5

88 Comments

  1. Does anyone have a recommendation for a good blog, article, or YouTube video explaining what compassion fatigue is in the context of Alzheimer’s? I’m talking to a fellow family caregiver about the concept and she had never heard of it before, but is intrigued and wants some tips on recognizing it and managing it. My first Google pass turned up pretty generic results and I know there’s better stuff out there – any ideas?

    1. Hmmm…. Do you mean that the caregiver has less compassion for others because their complaints/daily hardships seem so small compared to their daily grind as an Alzheimer’s caregiver?

      Or that others outside of the Alzheimer’s patient/caregiver circle begin to get fatigued in their compassion?

      It’s funny, but I was a caregiver for many years for parents with severe disabilities, and we never used this terminology.

      But I strongly recommend the Alzheimer’s association caregiver support group for your family member who is a caregiver and/or yourself, as they were a real lifeline for me.

      The experienced changed me forever. It is now difficult for me to deal with people who have never faced real hardships/life altering/life threating experiences before. I am working on that.

      1. No, that we are both (to some extent) struggling with having enough compassion for our family member with Alzheimer’s. We’re getting burnt out on the day-to-day demands and I’ve noticed that my fellow caregiver is getting very short and snappy with our family member and that she seems so fed up with some of the basic, predictable needs. It mirrors almost exactly the type of burnout my best friend experienced in her work as a social worker.

        1. Longtime caregiver and advocate here. You’ll probably find fewer resources around compassion fatigue, and more around caregiver burnout.

          1. yes… this is the more common terminology.

            yes, I’ve been there.

            your family member needs more help, rest, respite and compassion herself.

            and she needs the support group

  2. Anyone find a nice advent calendar this year?

    I’ve started sending advent calendars to my siblings the month before the holidays.
    We aren’t religious at all.
    But my adult brothers love having a little treat everyday.

    The popular ones are the chocolate ones and one brother loved the Star Wars legos one (!).
    I lean towards the edibles. But the highest recommended chocolate one is sold out already.

        1. We did that one and the palais teas advent last year, and every afternoon my husband and I had tea and toast (we both work from home.) It was great!

    2. My Aldi has the cheese one and the wine one in stock! both are probably terrible to ship to someone, though.

      1. I was thinking of shipping it to someone – what makes you think it would be terrible? Is it not packaged well?

        1. oh! just that the wine is heavy and shipping alcohol can be a pain, and the cheese is refridgerated. It’s possible, though!

      1. At this point, I feel like any religious ties to an advent calendar have disappeared from the vast majority of them, so I give you permission to buy one and treat yourself for the month of December. Or save it and use it as a daily treat in the bleak winter months :)

        1. Ha, thank you :) I may need to get one for January. It’s my least favorite month.

      2. We get advent calendars in our Jew-ish home (it’s one of the few childhood traditions I really wanted to keep) and my husband is very into it. We get a good chocolate one and a fancy gummy candy one, both from local shops with reasonably neutral decorations, and I put Hanukkah stickers on the appropriate dates so it’s a countdown for both holidays.

      3. I got an advent calendar for myself when I was counting down the days to the end of a very sick first trimester of pregnancy, so agreed, we should totally separate them from any religious tradition.

        It was the Diptyque one that I got used on ebay, and I loved it more than anything.

      1. The designs this year are awful though! I am a frequent TJ’s shopper and all their calendars this year just looked like ads. The only one without a huge logo design was sloths.

    6. I bought some advent calendar cards this year – so you get to open a window each day but don’t have mediocre chocolate. I know a lot of people like the ones that have a different type of tea each day.

    7. I am Jewish and kind of knew about advent calendars but never had one. This year I learned that the following companies offer advent calendars:
      * Godiva
      * Bonne Maman
      * Costco wines of the world.

      Reader, I bought the Costco wines of the world and can’t wait to do it.

    8. I have a Nespresso machine and bought their Advent calendar this year. Last year, I had one of the tea calendars. For the family, I bought an Advent calendar puzzle–each day, you put together a portion of the puzzle, and they all connect together at some point. And for my son, I bought the Lego Marvel Advent calendar.

    11. Thanks everyone!

      I ordered 5 different ones for different family/friends.

      Bon Maman jams
      Palais des Thes teas

      And several different chocolate ones

      Lindt
      Toblerone

      And the amazing looking one from Mirzam (Dubai)

      Happy New year!

    12. Deliciousfooddelivered.com has state and region specific calendars. I gave these to relatives this year. Bonnie Maman was ok but the flavors were not strong to me. They all kind of tasted the same. But you end up with a bunch of tiny jars that can be useful. Harry & David was kind of boring. Several repeats. Liberty of London is great and has full size items. Also can reuse the beautiful, sturdy box if you want to make your own. The beer and wine calendars caught our attention but they were just too much for us to consume.

  3. suggestions for cropped jeans? not petites, just short in the leg? I ordered a few pairs from nordstrom and clearly the model is 6 feet tall, they were not cropped on me. like a 26 inch inseam but missy rise (usually petites are too short in the crotch on me). Happy to pay less (loft and old navy do not seem to have lengths currently) but would go to $150 for a good pair. thanks!

    3. NYDJ, where you can shop by inseam. I think 26″ is more of an “ankle” than a “crop”, in terms of nomenclature.

    4. If you are willing go that high as far as price what about paying a tailor to get the hem exactly where you want it? Tailoring makes such a difference. I’m a short hourglass so I often need to get pants hemmed and taken in at the waist and it makes such a difference!

      1. i debated this but i have never been happy with hemmed jeans. they somehow always look dorky and not like they were supposed to look, i think it’s the stitching is different from the dry cleaner than it would be on the original pair. was debating just cutting a pair though as the unfinished hem seems to be a thing right now. My concern with that is they will slowly unravel and get shorter and shorter.

        1. Tell your tailor you want to preserve the original hem. It can be done with a pleat along the circumference of the leg right about the original hem – essentially just lifts it up a bit. .

    5. I haven’t tried them (yet), but my sister has been happy with the Short length from Express.

  4. Do you have a mantra that inspires you or gets you through tough times? If so, would you please share?

    1. I sing the Gloria Gaynor song “I will survive” to myself. If you are too young to remember you can google it.
      Also “This too shall pass works” for me.

    2. Per Senior Attorney, “the only way out is through.”

      I also find “it ends or it doesn’t” very meaningful from this poem by Caitlyn Siehl:

      It ends or it doesn’t.
      That’s what you say. That’s
      how you get through it.
      The tunnel, the night,
      the pain, the love.
      It ends or it doesn’t.
      If the sun never comes up,
      you find a way to live
      without it.
      If they don’t come back,
      you sleep in the middle of the
      bed
      learn how to make enough coffee
      for yourself alone.

      Adapt. Adjust.
      It ends or it doesn’t.
      It ends or it doesn’t.
      We do not perish.

      2. Winston Churchill said it before Senior Attorney, but a good sentiment all the same.

    3. I read a book called Deep Survival and it described various character and behavior traits that survivors of extreme situations shared. One phrase stuck out at the time and has stuck with me “Extreme mental toughness” (describing a man who survived 5 days with a ski injury on a downward sloping hill with no food). That’s my manta when it gets really hard “Extreme Mental Toughness”. It can feel a bit “buckle up buttercup” and it’s not for everyone but it’s gotten me through some tough times!

    6. This always helps:

      The Peace of Wild things…by Wendall Berry

      Cover of Wendell Berry’s

      When despair for the world grows in me
      and I wake in the night at the least sound
      in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
      I go and lie down where the wood drake
      rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
      I come into the peace of wild things
      who do not tax their lives with forethought
      of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
      And I feel above me the day-blind stars
      waiting with their light. For a time
      I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

    7. I have three that are really important to me, but the most important is:
      If your Nerve, deny you —
      go above your Nerve.

      (Emily Dickinson)

  5. Maybe a dumb question, but I leave for vacation next Wednesday. I went to get a few new pieces before I leave…but it feels dumb to shop RIGHT before everything is going to go on sale for Black Friday. There’s nothing I can do, right? Do any stores still price correct these days?

    3. Even if they don’t price adjust, you could go the route of buying a duplicate of the items on sale, then return those second copies using your first receipt. I have done that more than once with the blessing of a store clerk who couldn’t figure out how to get a price adjustment to go through.

    4. Yes many stores will price correct but there are lots of sales on now! I just had to do a last minute shopping trip to fit a color scheme for family photos and half the mall was on sale.

    5. Why not try thrifting? Better for environment and the price points are better than new.

  6. yes… this is the more common terminology.

    yes, I’ve been there.

    your family member needs more help, rest, respite and compassion herself.

    and she needs the support group

  7. I was updating my resume for an award at work and thinking about this – I have a period of about 8 months where I was between jobs and did some freelance consulting work. When I applied to my current job I had it on there so it didn’t look like a gap. Should I take it off now? It’s not terribly relevant and my other jobs are more impressive. There will just be an unexplained 8 month period 2 jobs ago.

    1. I wouldn’t take it off completely, 8 months is kind of a long time. Just make it one line about freelancing.

    2. I think for an award it is not really important either way. It seems different than a job interview. Focus on the accomplishment that matter for the award.

      1. I think the award was just the reason OP was updating her resume (so she had a working draft that included it), not that you needed to submit to receive the award.

        I think it’s great that you tried it but if it’s irrelevant as you say… If you leave it off, how does your work history look? Could you use years instead of months to gloss it over? Like Job 1 was 2018-2022, you consulted in 2022 and leave it off, job 2 is 2022-present?

    3. My resume only has years now (I’m 15+ years out of school, and this is appropriate in my industry). Would that minimize the gap?

  8. fun question for today: what fictional universe would you like to live in?

    I think my answer is something calming and peaceful like Winnie the Pooh, except I hate the forest. Hmn.

    2. Iain Banks’ “Culture” series universe. I recently started re-reading the series to help me cope with our current universe…

        1. Heh. It’s a concern, for sure, but in my head I’ll be having fun with Cherry and the nephew’s house sitting gay friend while we wait for Lucy to come fix any problem, ever.

    7. I would jump at the chance to be a Doctor’s companion or part of a background SG team.

    8. Right now I would be delighted to just find myself in the mid to late 90s when the world didn’t seem to be so on fire.

      1. I am prone to look back to those days fondly bc they were my teen years, but when I stop and really think about it, they were nuts. WTF was with all the cults? The Branch Davidians, those people who killed themselves because they thought a spaceship was following a comet, the poison gas on the subway people…and then you had all the right-wing militias all over the freaking place, stuff was getting bombed all the time (Oklahoma City, the embassies, the first WTC attack), the Unabomber…Marilyn Manson was a thing. Lots of people seriously thought the end of the world was coming on December 31, 1999. Columbine happened. It was a freaking weird-a$$ time.

      4. It was easier to shut out the world being on fire back then, that’s for sure.

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