Moved countries with two suitcases and a new office dress code, what do you buy first?

Buy for the next eight weeks only, then stop and reassess. Whatever season you are in right now is the only one you can actually judge fit and comfort in, and the six month plan will change once you have seen what people in your office genuinely wear. My order was two pairs of trousers that fit properly, one pair of shoes that are not trainers, three tops, and one layer for the office temperature. That is a full working fortnight and it cost well under a third of the budget.

I will disagree with the careful approach. Buy deliberately cheap placeholders for the first six weeks, wear them, and pay attention to what you reach for and what the room actually looks like. Every office has an unwritten code that no list can tell you, and in mine the expensive tailored thing I bought in week one read as trying too hard while the knitwear I bought as a stopgap became my uniform. Spend the real money in month two when you have data. The placeholder money is a research cost and it is smaller than the cost of one wrong good purchase.

Reserve a specific slice for alterations before you spend anything, because it changes what you can buy. I put aside about ten percent and it transformed the budget. A hem, a waist take-in and a sleeve shortening on a mid priced trouser gets you something that looks better than a garment costing three times as much off the rack.

The practical consequence is that you should shop for the shoulders and the hips, which are expensive to alter, and ignore length and waist, which are cheap. That single rule doubled the number of shops that were useful to me.

One line item that saved me real money: buy the coat and the boots in the end of season sales for next year rather than in the week you need them. I moved in September, bought a coat in a panic in November at full price, and saw the same coat at a fraction of it in February. Everything except the immediate two week starter set can wait for a sale cycle if you are patient about it.

I bought a capsule from a well known list years ago, twelve pieces, all sensible, and I wore four of them. The problem was that the list was designed around a life with more meetings and fewer trains than mine, and it had no opinion about the specific things my days actually contain. What finally worked was writing down what I did every day for two weeks, counting how many of those days needed what, and buying against that count. It turned out I needed far more of one thing and none at all of another the list insisted on.

Two trousers, one skirt or dress, three tops, one knit, one pair of proper shoes. Wear it for a month. Then buy the second layer of anything that wore out or annoyed you.