Now let's say that Judy owns a small business, she makes wedding dresses. Wedding dresses are very expensive and are made from delicate, easily ruined materials. Judy, therefore, can't afford to be anything less than constantly cautious when doing her job. But one day Judy's a little absorbed by a family crisis, and as she reaches for her sewing scissors her elbow knocks over her cup of coffee and it goes splashing, black and hot and ruinous, all over a pile of very expensive wedding material at the foot of the table. Judy's devastated, obviously. But perhaps she can rest a little easier knowing that she can write off the dress mess for tax purposes. Right? Wrong, Judy-wrong!

All right, now that we've established the sort of clothing that can't be written off for taxes, let's do a complete 360 and focus on the sort of clothing that can be written off for taxes. Really, there are only two things to look at here.
 You can write your clothing off for taxes if your boss demands it. In other words, you go get a new job and find out that there's a sort of uniform required. And it's not just for style-your boss's request is on the practical side. Let's say that you're required to buy a pretty expensive set of boots and pants and a shirt and a coat as well, all made of the same super tough, warm, long-lasting material. These are not the kinds of things you'd normally wear. Most people would not wear these things out regularly if they could help it. For one thing they're terribly hot, for another they're ugly, and besides they were made for a specific purpose: your job is to catch a certain vicious kind of monkey that lives always up in the trees and you need the battle armor-like clothing to protect yourself both from the animals and from the rough, scratchy tree bark. Now, that particular job example might seem a little farfetched, but you get the idea. To write clothes off for tax purposes, (a) it must be clothing REQUIRED by your boss and (b) it can't be clothing that can be worn for other purposes. (If your company requires you to wear a suit to work every day you can't write your suit off for tax purposes in other words. That's just common sense.) However, if you have to wear non-slip shoes, you can write those off as you would not normally buy non-slip shoes over some other variety.
 You can write your clothing off for tax purposes if you work in a profession such as: you fight fire, you're a cop, you deliver mail, you wait tables, you fly a plane or drive a bus etc. In other words a pretty specialized job where a uniform look is mandatory and what with cleaning bills and such can be quite costly as well.

These are the two basic things to keep in mind when wondering what sort of clothing you can write off for taxes-is it required, and is it a uniform?