I’ve always thought that fashion and feminism did not need to be at odds, probably because of my family lore. My great-grandmother sold mail-order cosmetics until she raised enough money to buy a dress store in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains, a choice that helped her avoid working in a mill or factory.
In my family, fashion was taken seriously as both a way out of less-than-ideal circumstances and a way to build confidence. Family bonding with female relatives often centered on serious shopping expeditions, and as we prowled department-store racks, my mother and grandmother taught me about color coordination, seasonal selling practices, fabric quality, even math. Given my background, I’ve always been surprised to hear some academics dismiss fashion as somehow frivolous. Can we really study identity politics without serious consideration of what we wear?
In the early 1990s, I went from a large public high school in North Carolina to Princeton University. This move was like being dropped off on another planet in many ways, especially sartorially. While at college, I began shifting my own wardrobe from preppy to grunge, as I altered my political views and the contents of my brain. I also began an intense study of my professors’ clothing.
Although academics have been widely denounced as having abysmal style, I didn’t find this to be the case for my professors. I was entranced by Diana Fuss’s leggings, boots, and peplum jackets. I was not used to seeing men dressed like Russell Banks: white button-down shirt, old Levi’s, red Chuck Taylors, and a rather large diamond-stud earring. My memories of Cornel West’s class involve him gesticulating wildly and drawing complicated diagrams on the chalkboard, while dressed in a perfectly tailored three-piece suit in light brown or gray.
I thought that these professors looked fabulous in ways that seemed to subtly complement their teaching styles. Their clothing even served as a mnemonic as I studied and wrote papers: I could picture the plum-colored jacket Diana Fuss wore when she taught Frankenstein to our English junior seminar. Visualizing her clothing while reviewing my notes helped me mentally recreate the classroom discussion as well as its tone.
When I now hear academics wonder aloud if their students even notice what they wear, I have to laugh. I considered my professors’ clothing a key part of the curriculum, integrated into the content of their lectures, the ways they interacted with students, and their very individuality. In Never a Dull Moment: Teaching and the Art of Performance, Jyl Lynn Felman writes: “The erotics of teaching means using the entire body from head to toe, within the pedagogical moment. For women faculty especially, this can be liberating, as we no longer have to cut off our bodies for the sake of preserving our brains. Our bodies and our passions—intellectual, emotional, corporeal—contribute to the excellence of our teaching.”
It’s scary to write about the erotics of teaching, especially since, as Felman also notes, many people conflate the concept with sexual innuendo. But the phrase is just another way of talking about that magic moment when a course takes flight, when intellectual sparks fly in a way that creates a bond between student and teacher that feels more than cerebral. That moment feels almost spiritual, encompassing us as total beings so that we are not even capable of dividing brain and body. Does clothing create that moment? Of course not. Can it provide a piece of the energy that contributes to the climate? Of course it can. Clothing helps establish, reinforce, confuse, and subvert the identities that coalesce in passionate academic discourse.
In graduate school, when I encountered the message that perhaps fashion and scholarship don’t mesh, I felt conflicted as I struggled to put together a teaching wardrobe. Interestingly, the negative messages about fashion came from my grad-school peers, not my professors. It wasn’t always overt, often merely complaints that “some people” were dressing up too much for seminars, with the implication that an interest in clothing must mean an incomplete commitment to academe.
For a long time, I’ve kept my thoughts about academic fashion to myself, mainly for fear of seeming frivolous, confiding only in like-minded friends. But a growing group of young, stylish academics, many in graduate school or early in their careers, is having these conversations online in fashion blogs for academics. Academichic, Threadbared, In Professorial Fashion, and What Would a Nerd Wear provide daily outfit inspiration and commentary. Already Pretty and Fashion for Nerds are not written by academics but have academic followings, links, and cross postings.
The blog Academichic explores fashion as “a powerful tool for creating identity, subverting class or gender norms, performing self, and appreciating aesthetic beauty,” doing so “in the face of all our eye-rolling colleagues.” While academic colleagues may be generally polite about fashion choices, the sense of risk rings true. Anyone who has attempted a new look on a mostly dressed-down campus has probably received some questions, if only the innocuous “Why are you so dressed up today?” Once, as I was headed to class, a colleague asked if I was going to a party, which may have been meant as a compliment but did not inspire confidence.
Academic fashion bloggers and their audiences discuss how sartorial choices affect classrooms, interviews, and day-to-day interactions with colleagues, often posting a photo of the day’s outfit, their thoughts on it, and readers’ reactions. The blogs provide a respite from the pop-culture world of fashion, both in their thoughtful commentary and in their general attitude toward the body. The bloggers mostly eschew fashion magazines’ body-type advice that tells readers to hide pear shapes in A-lined skirts and apple shapes in empire waists. Instead they encourage readers to embrace their bodies and wear what feels wonderful while cultivating an eye for detail in accessories, color, and texture.
Major spending is not on the menu, either. Academic fashion bloggers promote thrift-store shopping as well as DIY (yes, that means sewing, often of embellishments rather than whole cloth), “remixing” (recombining one’s own clothes to create new outfits), and even theft (usually from a loved one’s closet).
If I had come of age in a later era, the fashion blogs would have provided support as I transitioned from Southern preppy to grunge girl to professional academic. Now the blogs are challenging me to think about style in new ways and to be more creative and thoughtful as I construct my outfits. Although fashion gets a bad rap when it becomes the passive consumption of a predetermined aesthetic, I’m finding that it can also be a way of cutting through a disembodied sense of academic authority, of acknowledging that we, like our students, have bodies that we care for and use, even in our scholarly pursuits.
Dressing well—in a way that reflects one’s intellectual and emotional passions—is the expression of a body of knowledge. It is part self-knowledge, often hard-won over many years, but it may also involve knowledge of line, color, proportion, and fashion history. I hope that academics can bring fashion out into the open as a part of our general discourse about teaching and identity. The one aspect of the fashion blogs that saddens me is that many of the bloggers feel the need to remain partly or completely anonymous, despite the instruction they provide and the communities they create. In an ideal academic world, these bloggers’ work could be more integrated with their professional lives.
Certainly it’s possible to make a personal decision to ignore fashion. But it seems a shame to miss out on what fashion can teach us if we bring it out of the closet.
