Forget the handbook; look at the three most senior people you respect and note what they wear on an ordinary Tuesday. That's the office's real code. Your target sits one notch above the middle of it — enough polish to be taken seriously, not so much that Tuesday reads as an interview. One notch, not three: overdressing announces effort the way underdressing announces indifference.

Three bottoms, five tops, two layers — all chosen so any top works with any bottom and either layer. That's 30 combinations before repeating, a six-week rotation, from ten garments. The discipline that makes it work is the same as a capsule's: a tight neutral base, matched formality across every piece, colour arriving in the tops where it sits near your face and multiplies least dangerously.

Work clothes are worn ten hours, sat in for eight, and judged at 4 PM, not 9 AM. That verdict is decided by fabric: wool and ponte recover from a chair, linen surrenders to it, and the wrong synthetic announces itself in any warm meeting room. The one-fist test at the register — crush the fabric hard for five seconds, watch what it does — predicts the 4 PM meeting better than the mirror does.

A finished work wardrobe answers three days without shopping: the ordinary Tuesday, the surprise client meeting, and the offsite that says "casual" but means "still work." If any of the three sends you to a store in a panic, that's the gap — and it's usually the middle one, which one good blazer closes.