My office is having a spring outing — to a golf course. Some bigwigs are even flying in for meetings and the event. I only see these people in person a few times a year, at most. It is a relatively relaxed workplace, but athletic attire seems too casual and revealing; business casual, too stuffy. What do I wear? — Alexandra, Ardmore, Pa.

The spring or summer office outing is the warm-weather equivalent of the end-of-the-year office holiday party: a purportedly “fun” affair that actually causes all sorts of extra stress and worry. What to wear is a key part of that, not because it’s a frivolous consideration, but because it is core.

After all, you have crafted your work identity in one environment, and now you are being forced to translate that to another. The first thing your colleagues will be looking at (literally) is how you show up.

And though the question of dress at the holiday party is complicated, the question of dress at the supposedly relaxed outing is even worse.

Once, for example, in a previous job, I was organizing a conference in Las Vegas at a fancy hotel, which involved live interviews with a lot of chief executives of companies I was covering. I arrived the day before, unpacked, changed and headed off to the pool — only to discover, to my horror, all of those executives lounging around in their trunks or bikinis on various deck chairs or wading around the shallow end.

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I promptly fled back to my room and emerged only when I had to get onstage. In a suit. My relationships with those executives, and our carefully cultivated balance of power, did not involve anyone seeing anyone in a bathing suit.

So what to do? You don’t want to wear exactly the same thing you would wear in the office to the office outing; the whole point of such experiences is to show colleagues in a different light. But you also don’t want to look too different — unless, of course, your role in the company is to think out of the box. Then looking out of the box is fully consistent with your position.

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