Paula Bent admires her reflection in the mirror. She's come down to Midtown East from Mount Vernon, and, after spending some time perusing racks of freshly steamed blouses, dresses, and jackets, she's traded her jeans and sweatshirt for a pantsuit paired with a crisp white button-down. She's about to graduate college, and has a job interview soon that she's really hoping will go well. By the end of the day, she'll have two potential interview outfits, a fully edited resume loaded on a flashdrive, and—the volunteers working with her hope—the confidence boost she needs to ace the interview.
Bent is one of 30,000 women who has turned to Bottomless Closet, a New York City-based nonprofit, for help getting started in her professional career. The organization was created in 1999, not long after the 1996 passage of welfare reform, when the founders realized the difficulties some women coming off of public assistance were facing in the job market. They decided to start a nonprofit that would give women the tools they needed to enter the workforce, providing them with interview coaching, resume editing, and the eponymous "bottomless closet," full of donated clothing from which they could assemble outfits to wear on job interviews.
The bottomless closet. (Scott Heins/Gothamist)
In its first year, the organization saw about 500 women—now, 17 years later, it serves more than 3,000 per year. This year, they worked with their 30,000th client and hired a new executive director, Melissa Norden. The operation is almost entirely volunteer-driven: a small staff of nine full-time employees keeps things running at the Madison Avenue office, where some 150 volunteers work each week fitting clients with their outfits, editing their resumes, and preparing them for their upcoming job interviews. The organization also offers workshops in professional development and financial management, some of which are led by teams of corporate volunteers.
Unlike its competitors, Bottomless Closet is a completely local operation, and it prides itself on providing help to New York women, from New York women.
"We are really invested in our own community, and we want to make sure that the clients have those skills to get those jobs in order to remain New Yorkers," said Gineyda Diaz, Bottomless Closet's Director of Operations. "It's such a badge of honor to say 'I'm a New Yorker,' and so many of our clients are going through these difficult decisions—'without a job, how can I pay for rent; how can I move out of my current living situation; how can I provide for my children?'"
Bottomless Closet is located at 16 East 52nd Street, off Madison Avenue. (Scott Heins/Gothamist)
The organization recently moved from its former location above Hotel Pennsylvania to a new space on East 52nd Street. The place is an unusual amalgam of a modern office and an old-fashioned clothing boutique: to the left, when you enter, is a cluster of sunny offices whose walls are covered with bright graphics detailing the organization's mission; to the right are two adjoining, softly-lit rooms filled with blouses, dresses, jackets, jewelry, and shoes. Women enter in their everyday jeans and t-shirts, and emerge from the boutique's dressing rooms in flattering suits and separates.
Nearly everything in that dressing room is donated, either by individuals, manufacturers, or stores, though in recent years Bottomless Closet has noticed a slight downturn in donations, which it believes is due to the rise of outlet and factory stores. On the rare occasion that the organization receives a donation containing a piece of valuable designer clothing, it will typically resell it and use the money to buy items that it receives less frequently in donations, such as shoes, plus-sized clothing, and jewelry.
Though many offices today encourage employees to dress in business-casual or casual attire, Bottomless Closet's volunteers stick to traditional business attire when fitting clients for interviews—but that doesn't mean they can't have a little fun with it.
"Our clients are often more conservative than we are," said Sheila Lambert, who is one of the nonprofit's founders and served as its first executive director. Now, she works part-time as a volunteer with the clients. "A lot of the women come in and they want to have a black and navy or grey suit, and we'll tell them, 'You can wear a black skirt with a red jacket or something like that; you can have a little pizzazz. But we want you to look professional."
Paula leaves Bottomless Closet with two potential interview outfits. (Scott Heins/Gothamist)
It might seem superficial, but just the act of donning professional attire can be a tremendous confidence boost for someone who's spent her life believing she could never get an office job, Diaz said.
"A lot of our clients have never envisioned themselves in anything but a pair of jeans working at a McDonalds or something like that, and the transformation from the beginning to the end of a visit here, it's just a complete 180 sometimes," she said. "It's so beautiful."
On the day we visited Bottomless Closet, several volunteers were working with a group of women who'd been referred by the Borough of Manhattan Community College—there was Paula Bent, who was preparing for an interview at a children's charity, and she was joined by Dileydi Taveras, who was looking for jobs as a medical assistant and hopes to eventually become a midwife. Taveras, who took an hour-long subway ride from Cypress Hills to get to Bottomless Closet, said she wasn't initially that enthused about her appointment, as the school had set it up on her behalf. But to her pleasant surprise, she found the coaching helpful, and left with a new suit and skirt in tow.
"They encourage you—'You look nice, you're fine!'" she said. "I would have never known about dressing professionally—you can't show cleavage, you have to be professional. I struggled with that in the past, what to wear in a corporate environment, and there was no help. I had to figure it out myself."
Erica Frederick helps Chrisdalene Billups with her resume and interview skills. (Scott Heins/Gothamist)
After finding two interview outfits, each client sits down with a volunteer and goes over her resume. The key thing at this stage, Diaz and Lambert said, is to make sure the clients aren't selling themselves short. Diaz recalled cases where a client didn't mention on her resume that she was bilingual, or left off the fact that she had a PhD from another country, because she didn't think that would necessarily help her land a job.
"There was a woman who taught herself sign language because she has a child who is deaf, and she didn't realize that that was a second language," Diaz recalled. "It's literally, you taught yourself a second language. To be able to say, 'I have this skill, and I taught it to myself,' it's very profound. I've had the pleasure of working with clients and finding that and saying, 'Oh my goodness, this is amazing, we need to put this on here!'"
Throughout each client's hour-and-a-half long visit, there's a constant flow of conversation from the boutique to the resume-editing room, as volunteers ask their clients about their backgrounds; their families; their favorite colors; whether they prefer pumps to flats, or maybe a pair of wedges. At the end of the day, the organization isn't trying to churn out carbon-copy corporate drones, but rather to empower women to try for jobs they might be conditioned to think are out of their reach.
"I really believe that when you help a woman it has a ripple effect, and we help the women of this city," Lambert said. "That only makes the city stronger."
Employees at Bottomless Closet. (Scott Heins/Gothamist)
To find out how to volunteer or donate clothing to Bottomless Closet, check them out on their website.
