Once, when I was a graduate student at Yale, a history professor asked me about my dissertation. "I'm writing about fashion," I said.
"That's interesting. Italian or German?"
It took me a couple of minutes, as thoughts of Armani flashed through my mind, but finally I realized what he meant. "Not fascism," I said. "Fashion. As in Paris."
"Oh." There was a long silence, and then, without another word, he turned and walked away.
The F-word still has the power to reduce many academics to embarrassed or indignant silence. Some of those to whom I spoke while preparing this article requested anonymity or even refused to address the subject; those who did talk explained that many of their colleagues found it "shameful to think about fashion." One professor explained the "denial" of fashion this way: "People say that they don't care about fashion, but that may be because they aren't self-conscious enough to envision a personal s tyle. Style is what most academics don't have."
Academics may be the worst-dressed middle-class occupational group in the United States. But they do wear clothes. So I set out to discover what professors choose to wear (the clothes don't grow in their closets), what they think about fashion (even when they claim not to think about it), and, well, why they tend to dress so badly.
Obviously, a university is not like a law firm, where the rules governing appropriate attire are both narrow and explicit. Back in the 1950s some universities did have a coat-and-tie rule, but this has long since disappeared. Peter Baldwin, an assis tant professor of history at UCLA, remarks that academics are "under no pressure to dress well." And Deborah Kaple, a lecturer in sociology at Princeton, observes that some academics regard it as "one of the perks" of the job that they "don't have to pay attention" to how they dress. But if everyone in academia is happily doing his or her own thing, why is it so often the same thing? (Just look around your department.)
"Theoretically, anything goes," says Susan Kaiser, author of The Social-Psychology of Clothing: Symbolic Appearances in Context and associate professor at UC Davis, "but in practice, within a small-group context, such as a department, a subtle kind of negotiation goes on. We influence one another."
Certain widely held (but little examined) philosophical and epistemological assumptions militate against on-campus sartorial nonconformity. In academic circles, many professors say, clothing is perceived as "material" (not intellectual) and, therefor e, "beneath contempt." There is a sharp division between "the life of the mind and that of the body"--and as a result (one professorial source quips) academics tend to have "bad bodies, and no one dresses well."
According to John Brewer, a professor of history at UCLA, "To dress fashionably is to be labeled frivolous, to seem to care about the body and, therefore, by implication to downplay the life of the mind. Most colleagues view sartorial interest and esp ecially sartorial 'play' or facetiousness with a mixture of amusement, condescension, and fear. Dowdy is safe and serious; bad dressing, one of the last ways in which academics can project the illusion of other- worldliness."
Among leftists, fashion is also regarded as "bourgeois," and so they often "go out of their way to distance themselves" from it, observes Michael Solomon, editor of The Psychology of Fashion and chairman of the Department of Marketing in the bus iness school of Rutgers University. Aging "'68 types" are often "aggressively informal," agrees Baldwin, and "deliberately dress down for class." But even conservative professor often look barely respectable. In fact, because so many academics implicit ly believe that fashion is frivolous, vain, and politically incorrect, certain styles are, in effect, virtually compulsory, while others are practically taboo.
When asked to characterize academic style, one Dartmouth professor immediately replied, "Tweedy and rumpled. But don't quote me." A woman at UC San Diego also summed up her male colleagues' sartorial style as "ratty tweed jackets and tight jeans." Please notice the modifiers "ratty" and "rumpled" (more later on "tight").
This state of neglect, which in the academic setting reads as a self-conscious lack of interest, dates back at least to the 1950s and has Anglophile, even Anglican, antecedents. Gospel, according to the traditional upper-class Englishman, has it that a good Donegal tweed jacket lasts forever. If it gets a bit frayed, all the better. American academics have simply copied this shabby- genteel look, so today the tenured sons of Russian, Italian, Polish, and Irish immigrants all look like rural Church o f England vicars.
In the modern American context, to wear jackets rather than suits is to adopt a lesser degree of formality compared, for example, with businessmen or, closer to home, college administrators. But to wear a sports jacket and tie imparts an impression o f formality and authority. . . .
Beginning in the 1960s, when dress codes and disappeared from American high schools, a new academic style also emerged among college professors. As British art historian Anita Brookner puts it, "All degrees of seniority are obliterated in the desire to look as young [and] carefree . . . as possible." Indeed, far from wanting to look like professionals or even working adults, professors "are dressed for play" (London Review of Books, April 15-May 5, 1982).
Blue jeans are the operative garment here. How better to assert solidarity with the young than to dress like them? And jeans have the added advantage of having (formerly) been associated with the proletariat. A professor might be the oldest, most po werful, and least hip person in the classroom, but his anti-establishment clothing signified that he was a free spirit opposed to pernicious hierarchical distinctions between the teacher and the taught.
Also, jeans tend to be worn tight. "Not to put too fine a point on it, his attire can be saying that he is ready to sleep with his students," wrote Jacob Epstein, an English professor at Northwestern University and author of "Reflections of an Academi c Dandy," published in Gentlemen's Quarterly (October 1985). Surrounded by young people yet aging themselves, many professors succumbed to a type of arrested sartorial development. However, novelist Angela Carter is probably correct in suggesting that "jeans have lost their chic since the class of '68 took them into the senior common room . . . . They are now . . . a sign of grumpy middle age" (New Society, January 13, 1983). And one California professor reports that her students have sa id that professors should not wear jeans because they are "too old."
The sweater, either alone or under a jacket, is another garment frequently worn by male academics. Sweaters, of course, can be extremely beautiful, but in academic circles they almost invariably represent what one male professor ruefully calls another aesthetic "missed opportunity." As one woman scholar complains, the majority of professor seem to wear baggy, stretched-out sweaters in boring colors and cheap materials.
Women academics are "a disaster," insists one female professor in California, citing frumpy suits, sensible shoes, and outmoded haircuts. With their "asexual clothing and handbags [that] are satchels," with "no makeup and no jewelry," laments one woman professor at an Ivy League university, the "subconscious message" of her collegial sisters is: "If I could, I'd be male."
Certainly, femininity is out. So is anything too conspicuous or body-revealing. Like most female professionals, the majority of women in academia tend to minimize any sartorial eroticism while maximizing status signifiers. "Most female faculty look like bankers and lawyers, even when the men are in polo shirts," is the succinct assessment of a UC San Diego scholar.
Yet upon closer inspection, women academics do not really look like bankers, lawyers, or business executives. Sad to say, they lack marketplace flair. Skirts, for example, tend to be significantly longer than those of most professional women: to mid -calf, when the fashionable length is slightly above the knee. The jacket (the female executive's badge of authority) is seen less often in academia, where professors tend to wear separates.
Female academics almost never wear high heels, which are regarded as "politically retrograde." But most professional women do wear heels, and the highest-paid female executives frequently wear the highest heels. Academics eschew color (even as accent s); instead, they favor "low-keyed earth tones" or "frumpy beige." Says one female professor, some are "literally slovenly"--a cardinal sin in the business world. And even when trying to look "nice," women academics tend to dress like teenagers: unsop histicated flower-print dresses (Laura Ashley neo- Victoriana seems to appeal to historians) or simple skirts and blouses.
Thus, although professors self-consciously perform in classrooms and lecture halls, they tend to ignore sartorial strategies of self-presentation and seldom use clothing to "sell" themselves. The "cult of authenticity," says one Californian, means tha t you can't and shouldn't "disguise who you are."
What is responsible for this distaff fashion debacle? The problem, says Nancy Koehn, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, is that for women to be well dressed (not even fashionable, just well put together) can be "a double-edged sword." W hile students may actually prefer professors to dress with some flair (sophisticated post-sixties consumers, they do not share the fashion biases of their professors), says Koehn, there is always a question mark in her colleagues' minds: "Can we possibly take her seriously if she wears an Anne Klein skirt?"
Sexually provocative dress is "definitely a big issue," according to a number of women professors who report that both male and female students "always" comment on their appearance. The remarks are usually positive "great dresser! so cool!") or innocu ous ("She wore the same outfit twice in a row. I counted"). But not always.
"I can't concentrate on my work if I get a hard-on." A woman professor coming up for tenure at an Ivy League university is said to have received this comment on one of her student evaluations. She felt that it constituted sexual harassment and had it suppressed, but the issue is not so easily dismissed. Is your dress provocative to students? How sexy are you allowed to look? These are questions, freighted with anxiety, that women academics of all political persuasions confront daily. One woman co ncludes that students tend to "take you more seriously if you wear a bra." A woman's colleagues may also be deeply hostile to the idea of feminine or provocative dress
"I don't lecture to students wearing a codpiece," expostulated one male economist, as he angrily recalled that when he was teaching a MIT, a female colleague gave a lecture wearing a short skirt. "The students kept staring at her legs; it was very unp rofessional. Women should dress to be one of the boys."
Can a style of dress hurt one's professional career? True to form, most academics deny that it makes any difference whatsoever. But a few stories may indicate otherwise: When a gay male professor was denied tenure at an Ivy League university, some people felt that he was penalized, in part, for his dress. It was "not that he wore multiple earrings" or anything like that, but he did wear "beautiful, expensive, colorful clothes that stood out" on campus. At the design department on one of the campu ses of the University of California system, a job applicant appeared for her interview wearing a navy blue suit. The style was perfect for most departments, of course, but in this case she was told--to her face--that she "didn't fit in, she didn't look a rty enough."
Another bit of evidence that suggests dress is of career significance for academics is the fact that some universities (such as Harvard) now offer graduate students counseling on how to outfit themselves for job interviews. The tone apparently is patr onizing ("You will need to think about an interview suit and a white blouse"), but the advice is perceived by the institution as necessary. Graduate students also talk to one another about what to wear to a thesis-defense interview. In fact, this is one of the few times when it is acceptable in academia to talk about one's clothing and appearance.
"My clothes are an expression of who I am," said one professor, "but I can't talk about it." Clothes, then, are a taboo subject, a forbidden realm of pleasure. Many of the very same professors who censoriously dismiss the pleasures of dress may well
lavish time and money on couture cuisine, stereos, Volvos, computer gadgetry, skis, travel, and wine. But not clothes.
From Lingua Franca, 1991