Q: I'm a handyman and I often worry that I am wearing the wrong outfit when I go to someone's house or business to fix something. What do you do when your first call in the morning is unstopping someone's toilet and your next one is fixing the espresso machine at a coffee house bookstore that has only luxury cars and SUV's in the parking lot?

A: Sounds like you need to schedule messier jobs for later in the day, but that's probably easier said than done.

You could keep a clean shirt and jeans in the truck for emergencies. But your best bet may be a uniform. One advantage of those brown Carhartt coveralls and jackets and pants is they look like you're on official business -- and also don't show dirt. Black or dark-blue denim probably has pretty much the same effect.

If you're wearing, say, a dark khaki shirt and pants that are clearly work clothes, it's not the same sort of faux pas for them to be stained or smudged as it would be with civilian clothes because work clothes are meant to get dirty. Like, a pastry chef isn't embarrassed to be seen covered with flour, anymore than painters are mortified to have paint on their white overalls. It's almost a badge of office.

The other thing to consider is that most of the customers at your fancy-dan coffee shop are probably wearing jeans, so how formal do you need to get? I'd say that maybe the main consideration here is that something that looks like work clothes -- like the khaki shirt and pants -- might be useful to you because right up front it tells people you take your work seriously and you know what you're doing. If you show up in the same old T and jeans they're wearing, they may wonder if you really know any more about plumbing or electricity than they do.

A plumber I know says his Carhartt coveralls automatically confer authority. He says he can walk into any building in town in them, no questions asked. People assume he has a job to do.

Patricia McLaughlin is a nationally syndicated fashion columnist.
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