'It is an investment': Women are paying $50K to dress for the job they want — does it actually pay off?

But for women already in leadership roles or hoping to climb the corporate ladder, the anything-goes era has created a new problem: What exactly are you supposed to wear?

“Esepcially after COVID, there was this idea that it’s not politically correct to tell people what to wear anymore. But that just made a lot of people, especially women, very confused,” Alison Bruhn, co-founder of The Style That Binds Us, told The Cut.

Some women are reportedly spending as much as $50,000 to build an executive wardrobe and polish their professional image. The question is whether looking the part can actually help you get the part.

Looking the part

Delia Folk, who co-founded the advisory firm with her mother, Bruhn, said the pair kept hearing the same complaint from HR departments after the pandemic.

“We kept hearing from HR departments at major companies — they were all saying, ‘You wouldn’t believe what our employees are wearing to work. We don’t know how to approach this,’” she told The Cut.

That uncertainty eventually became a business opportunity. The mother-daughter duo began working with companies including Blackstone, Nasdaq, Barclays and Goldman Sachs, along with law firms such as Davis Polk, teaching employees how to use their wardrobe to shape how they are perceived at work and potentially help move their careers forward.

“It is an investment. But most people, especially in New York City, don’t have a lot of closet space,” Folk said.

And while worrying about the cut of a blazer or the shoes you wear into a meeting may sound superficial, how you present yourself can have very real career consequences.

A survey of 1,000 hiring managers and bosses in the U.K., commissioned by Greene King, found that 90% considered having a professional appearance an important part of successfully navigating their company’s hiring process.

More than half — 51% — admitted they had judged a candidate based on their appearance, while 40% of those employers said they had passed on someone because of what they were wearing.

The price of polish

For some professionals, looking the part has become a business expense in its own right. In luxury real estate, for example, New York agent Ashley Reidy Quinn told Business Insider she spent roughly $100,000 on clothing in 2025, arguing that her appearance is part of the experience she sells to multimillion-dollar clients.

“I tie my personal appearance hand-in-hand with how I show up for a client,” Quinn told Business Insider. “It’s part of the full-picture business portrayal of you as an individual, so I take that very seriously.”

Most executives are not dropping six figures on their wardrobes, but figuring out what to wear can still become overwhelming. Bruhn said some women burst into tears during their first meeting, exhausted by demanding careers, travel and family responsibilities — with their wardrobe becoming one more decision they simply don’t have the bandwidth to make.

Taking that problem off their plate, however, can come with a hefty price tag. Folk said their services typically start at a couple thousand dollars, while clients looking for an ongoing retainer arrangement can spend $50,000 or more.

That is a far cry from what the average office worker may have in mind. Back in 2021, as Americans prepared to swap their sweatpants for office clothes again, a survey commissioned by Kontoor Brands found that 84% of U.S. workers said they needed to refresh their wardrobes before returning to the office. On average, they expected to spend about $445 on new clothes.