A new dress for success.

• Author: Ervin, Mike
• Position: Bottomless Closet helps welfare recipients dress for job interviews

Chicago

Conspicuously missing from this women's boutique on the edge of downtown Chicago is a cash register. All clothes and accessories are free. The clientele is select--by appointment only. You have to be a woman on welfare referred by one of twenty-five agencies. This is Bottomless Closet, where women who are ready for job interviews that could be the catalyst to a self-sufficient future find the clothes they'll need (but can't afford) to make that crucial good impression.

The operative word here is boutique. Bottomless Closet is intentionally designed to look that way, even though everything is second-hand. There are pink satin curtains on the dressing rooms. Outfits are displayed on mannequins rather than strewn about on tables, and accessories are aesthetically arranged in display cases. Volunteers give individual attention to each client.

"We treat them like buyers," says Bottomless Closet board member Lynda Wright. "We give them control of the situation."

Sometimes what happens to a woman at Bottomless Closet, Wright says, is literally "a transformation." It may sound like an exaggeration, but not to Wright, who used to find herself in the same position as the women who shop here. These days she works helping residents of public housing in Chicago start their own businesses. But when her seventeen-year marriage abruptly ended in divorce ten years ago, she found herself with four kids to support, no job, and no job skills. She squeaked by on public assistance during the years she went back to school. Then came time for job interviews.

"I knew I was qualified for the jobs," she says. But she also knew that her confidence was not coming through in the interviews. She felt her clothes were inadequate, which made her feel inadequate. "By the time I entered I already downgraded...