Do clothes really “make” the person? Or are they just the superficial outer garments that someone puts on. Clothier Lake Lester has some ideas about the subject.
“I’d compare clothes to a realtor showing a house,” he explained. “It may be gorgeous on the inside. They may have completely remodeled it on the inside. It may have the most beautiful kitchen, and the bathrooms have been redone, but if you pull up in front of the house and the grass is up to here, the weeds have taken over, the landscaping hasn’t been taken care of in months, your customers probably are not even going to stop at that house. They didn’t even give you a chance to see what’s on the inside. That’s what your wardrobe does for you. It gives you a chance to let the other person get to know you. Otherwise, they may not even want to talk with you.”
A calling
Lester has been working with clothes for a long time.
“I’m located in Casanova now,” he stated. “I’ve been there for seven years, but I’ve been in business since 1978. I had a stint in between with another company, but I’ve always kept this business. I had a store in Fairfax City for 15 years.”
And what can he do for a client? It depends.
“Generally I have a conversation of about an hour to find out who your clients are, who you’re going to be seeing in business,” he said. “If you’re in sales, or you may be an attorney going to court, you’re going to be in front of the public, and you want to dress for the part that you’re going to be playing because you want to leave that lasting impression, especially with a first-time customer.
“If you’re going for a job interview, I would find out what the job is, what company it’s going to be with,” he continued. “If it’s a landscaping company (for example), I would say, ‘You shouldn’t wear a suit. You should dress business casual. Don’t wear your jeans, don’t wear an old T-shirt because you’ve never met your interviewer. He doesn’t know anything about you.’ Someone meeting you for the first time, they make a lot of decisions about you just by the way you’re dressed. They will decide if you’re an educated person, if you’re trustworthy, if they really want to do business with you.”
The science of clothes
Lester said that he learned a lot about clothes by reading and studying the research done by an advertising icon of another age, one who became known as “The Marlboro Man.”
“As a young actor, the man who became The Marlboro Man would try out for parts,” Lester reported. “He would sit in the audience until his time came, and he watched people going in behind the curtain. They were going to wardrobe, and they came out dressed for the part they were going to play, and he said, “Boy, that is something.’ They would come out transformed into a character, and he saw that it was the wardrobe that did it, so he studied it as a science. All during his lifetime, he studied. He was a keynote speaker at one of my meetings. You don’t think about the science of it until you start reading and thinking, and then you begin to understand just what wearing the proper clothes can do for a person.”
Ah, but what about the cost of nice clothes? What about simply buying something on sale?
“Some say, ‘I really can’t afford it.’ Well, whatever your budget is, you can start small and gradually build up,” Lester explained. “It’s not really an expense to your business, it’s an asset to your business because you’re investing in yourself.”
Lester works with both women and men, focusing on business wear, with some casual clothes recommended as well.
“I would see what you might need (for a new job). I would talk a little bit about your budget. What can you afford? We would look at what you have and build on that. I do off-the-rack and made-to-measure. We would pick out some swatches that they like, I would do the measurements and send to my manufacturer. It takes about six weeks to make a suit.”
Most can see that American society has become more accommodating in terms of what one can wear, and that can present a problem in professional life.
“Most people never get trained as to what looks good on them,” he said. “Part of my business in the future is to teach young people coming out of school how to dress because they’ve never been taught. A guy graduates and now he has to go get a job. He has an interview next week, and he says, ‘I’ve been wearing jeans all through school, I don’t know what to wear.’ That’s the kind of customer I’d like to get a hold of to teach what they need.
“My ideal customer would be a young man who is serious about his dress, and he really wants to move up in business,” Lester continued. “’And I’m going to dress not for the job, I have but for the job I want.’ It’s a process. It’s an investment, really. And I can do the same thing for women.”
Lake Lester can be reached at (703) 943-7193. His website is courtclothingbylake.com.
By George Rowand