Are you planning on heading to an upcoming career fair but have nothing to wear to it? Well, the University of Connecticut’s Undergraduate Student Government has you covered.
USG’s Clothing Closet, a pop-up shop where UConn students can acquire free professional attire, is having its first run of the year from Friday to today in room 026 of the Wilbur Crossing Building.
The Clothing Closet, which will be open from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. today, offers suit jackets, dresses, skirts, pants, shirts, ties and belts, according to a USG Instagram post.
All UConn students are allotted 18 “credits” a semester to purchase items. A suit jacket or dress is five credits, a skirt or pair of pants is three credits, a shirt is two credits and a belt or tie is one credit.
This is USG’s third year hosting the Clothing Closet, USG Director of External Affairs Lucas Landry, a fifth-semester economics and political science major, said.
“I was pretty fortunate to have inherited this initiative,” Landry said. “It’s a collaboration between USG, Goodwill and the UConn career center where we receive pallets of clothing from Goodwill annually.”
The goal of the Clothing Closet is to give students an accessible source for professional clothing to wear to events such as career fairs, internships and interviews, Landry said.
“The unfortunate reality is there’s kind of the expectation that you dress to impress, but there certainly is a financial barrier to entry with professional clothing, and we’re at a pretty volatile age as it comes to size where stuff you had in high school may not fit you,” Landry said.
If you missed out on the first opening of the Clothing Closet, don’t worry — Landry said that there will be more openings throughout the year.
“This was just an early opening for the career fair,” Landry said. “We’ll continue to operate through the semester and hope to help more students.”
USG receives over 3,000 guaranteed articles of professional clothing from Goodwill annually to go towards the Clothing Closet, Landry said.
“Truthfully, we have too much right now,” Landry said, “We get them, sort through the sizes that would be most applicable to students, the most common sizes and, truthfully, also relevant styles. A lot of the things that people donate are straight from the 70s.”
So far, the Clothing Closet has only ever been a physical pop-up shop that opens periodically throughout the year, Landry said, but this year he’s trying to change that.
“This year we’re trying to do something new, hopefully implementing it second semester, where we can have an online function for students to pick up the clothes from here,” Landry said.
Landry said he hopes to open it up as a “mini drive-through,” where students can order clothes from the pop-up shop year-round online.
“[The pop-up shop] creates a barrier of students physically searching through clothes,” Landry said. “[An online function] would allow us to be open on days where maybe we don’t have the staffing to open the full shop.”