Dressing for Success: Harder Than it Sounds!

My boyfriend, Joe, recently started his first real job.  His usual outfit of t-shirt and jeans or t-shirt and basketball shorts was no longer going to cut it thanks to a laid back, but still business casual, dress code.  In the past couple weeks, he's built up a respectable base wardrobe with collared shirts and khakis.  Jeans are ok, so our next mission is to find him some better fitting jeans, but that man is impossible to buy pants for.

Every week day, I get to watch him go off to work dressed like the brand new yuppie he is.  And then I look down at what I'm wearing.  And I get sad.

See, working in a chemistry lab, your dress code is:  long pants and no open toed shoes/sandals.  There's really no point to dressing nicely.  With my luck, the first day I wore a nice new shirt, I'd probably spill acid all over myself.  Not that I've ever done that so far (knock on wood) but that's just how life goes.  So 95% of the time, I'm in a t-shirt and jeans.  But come on, I'm closing in on 25.  I shouldn't be shopping in the junior's section anymore!  There's gotta be some sort of compromise between looking nice but still casual enough for a lab, right?

What I'd love to do is box up half of my current wardrobe or more, donate it, and go on a massive shopping spree.  I don't know quite where I'd go, though.  Kohl's and JCP are two of my go-to cheap clothing stores, but then I have to deal with the fact that if I try to shop in the "misses" section, I'm pretty much limited to styles which come in an x-small.  I'm not trying to brag here.  I don't normally complain about "vanity sizing" but it's a bit ridiculous.  I don't care much for my own sake because I can almost always find something that fits, but I am by no means "extra small."  There are people out there who are much smaller than me - what do they do when they want to shop for something outside the junior's section?

Sorry, tangent aside, I just want to find a way to dress a little nicer than I currently do without having to worry incessantly about ruining the clothes in lab.  Well, I say that, but here's what I bought on my last shopping trip:

- yoga shorts (They're longer than the ones I currently use as pajamas, making them acceptable for public!)
- crop top (it's summer and it's hot, wah wah)
- muscle tank with neon rainbow zebra on it (wah wah hot summer, plus gym shirt..?)
(all from the junior's section)

So, as it stands, I still haven't solved the problem of what to wear to work.  I'm going to keep trying, and in the meantime, I'll still just be wearing band shirts and my rainbow of v-necks...