I wore jeans, fluorescent shoes (see my Facebook page http://bit.ly/gidg for a picture), and a T-shirt to the HBS Club of Boston presentation on “Emerging Billion-Dollar Trends.”
Nothing happened.
People I knew talked to me. The presenter hugged me. The guy sitting next to me chatted. A couple of venture capitalists entered the conversation I was part of and were as courteous as they ever are. I had a perfectly fine time.
No one seemed offended, taken aback, disrespected, or dismissive. My worst fears simply didn’t materialize along any dimension. (I suspected they wouldn’t. When I noticed how much emotional energy I had invested in being afraid it would be problematic, that very investment was a clue that irrational emotional crap was almost certainly overreacting to a real world situation. The fact that many other people have the same fear does not in any way make the fear more real.)