I am an American visiting Kuala Lumpur on business. I dress pretty casually - t-shirt tucked in jeans/nice travel pants, Adidas Samba sneakers, and the like. Think casualwear from Old Navy, Uniqlo, H&M, etc. I never needed to dress business formal for my job, so I don’t really have business formal clothing.
I could buy a few pieces if needed, but not sure if wearing what I normally wear would be very out of place or offensive! Can someone please shed some light on how most women in their early 30s dress in the office?
Depends on the company culture of course, but the places I’ve been in Malaysia have dressed fairly casually (lots of polos or casual collared shirts but a t-shirt was fine), what you describe wouldn’t be a problem. The only thing to pay attention to is that if your office has Muslim people it is generally respectful to wear long pants instead of shorts (I went to a factory in Malaysia once and wore shorts because it is ungodly hot and my next colleague to visit got a friendly reminder to wear long pants).
Yeah avoid showing cleavage or legs. Long pants in lightweight fabric should serve fine. Uniqlo Airism will do.
Not to mention when you’re indoors the aircon is actually cold.
I’ve always found it helpful to google for “ business etiquette” to understand the cultural pitfalls of any particular place.
So apparently it just deleted part of my comment? The thing to google is “[name of country] business etiquette”