I have a running disagreement with myself about the black bardot top that I have never fully resolved, and it is not about whether it fits, it is about whether it looks like a going out top wearing a work blazer’s schedule by mistake. Half of me thinks a bare shoulder line has no business at a 9am stand up. The other half has worn one under a blazer to three client meetings this quarter alone and reported back that nobody said a word, which either means it read as completely normal or means everyone was too polite to mention it, and I genuinely cannot tell you which.
Here is what I will say without argument: the shoulder fit is the whole decision. Too tight across the neckline and every time you reach forward for a laptop charger or, God forbid, lean in to grab something off a shared desk, you spend the rest of the meeting doing a subtle shoulder shimmy to get everything back where it should be. I own one that does this and I have made peace with wearing it only to things where I am mostly sitting still, which is a strange thing to admit about a top that cost more than my last two work lunches combined.
The one I should have returned is a stiffer knit that looked structured on the hanger and turned into something closer to a corset every time I sat down for longer than an hour, which, in my job, is most of the day.
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I kept it because returning it felt like admitting defeat on a purchase I had already defended out loud to the woman two desks over, who complimented it the one day I wore it and has never complimented anything since. Pride is not a real cost benefit category but it absolutely factored in.
The one I nearly returned and shouldn’t have is a softer, slightly heavier one that I almost sent back over a fit note that turned out to be nothing, and I only kept it because the return window closed while I was still deciding, which tells you something about how much thought I actually put into forty dollars of fabric versus how much I put into anything that matters.
Nobody warned me about the lint. Black bardot tops, it turns out, are basically a lint and pet hair magnet with a neckline, and mine collects both a suspicious amount of my own hair and an amount of my neighbor’s cat’s fur that I cannot explain given I have never met that cat’s owner and definitely never invited the cat over. I keep a lint roller in my desk drawer now specifically for this top, which is its own small admission.
I still haven’t settled whether it belongs in a work rotation or strictly after 6pm. I lean both ways depending on the week, and I’ve stopped pretending that’s a contradiction worth resolving.
