Academic fashion: an oxymoron?

i haven't written for a long while, in part because i have been musing over a new style - needing one, wanting one. i love what blogging has taught me about writing, but i feel i understand the witty peroration and i want to try something new. and/or i might write a more focused, issue-specific blog (stay tuned).

but for those of you who might be interested, here's what i recently had to say on the topic of "academic fashion" (it's forthcoming in ESC: English Studies in Canada, later this year - remember, you read it here first!):

What to wear is always a loaded question, even in academic circles that pretend to be above such vulgarities. In fact, pretending to be above such vulgarities might be the quintessence of academic fashion, judging from the results of a quick google search on the phrase. Comments on the web range from the casual:

“As an academic, I see nothing wrong with jeans and tee-shirts. Anything more complex is more trouble than it’s worth.”

to the ardent:

“I wear a t-shirt and shorts (unless it’s too cold for shorts) to teach in. I wear that to conferences too. Call me crazy but I got into academia on the theory that it was my brains that mattered not my looks. I wear a tie for no man.”

to the downright polemical:

“I’m an academic. I spend most of my day sitting at my computer or working in the library. There is nobody looking over my shoulder. No one is going to fire me because there is a hole in the elbow of my pullover. Why shouldn’t I wear what I like? Why the fuck should I have to copy the dress code of ‘people over thirty who work in public relations’? GIVE ME MY FREEDOM! GIVE ME MY MOTHEATEN OLD PULLOVER!”

Well.

Mind over body: Descartes still rules the university, in an unholy alliance with Calvin and Weber. We are a sober people, we academics, suspicious of glitz and flash and self-promotion. We are socially positioned in a way that works against stylishness, too. We may be wealthy by global standards, but we earn the salaries of public employees. Since we work all the time, we have few opportunities for frivolities like shopping. And while we might have broken down the ivory-tower stereotype conceptually, for the most part our campuses still tend to be enclaved in the city: fashion is not something you can easily fall into, the way (I imagine) you could if you worked in a downtown office tower.

Mind over body, work before play, frugality above all: the antithesis of fashion.

But what if you’re embodied? Let me make an old-fashioned move here and assert that the stakes are different for women. Expectations are higher, exhortations are more urgent, and possibilities are more loaded. Men might get away with motheaten sweaters, but women generally don’t. Fashion is highly gendered, and gender normative – so when I refer to “women” in this context, you should hear white, middle-class, slender, gender-conforming women. Academics are not outside that interpellative address, no matter how much we might want to dismiss “couture” as a despicable ancien régime.

Too brainy for mass-culture girlishness but still interpellated as feminine by popular and academic culture, women are caught between the diabolical anxieties of being pretty enough and being smart enough. As a result, we get it coming (“It’s scary that you know a woman’s a social scientist when she’s wearing a certain type of dress or skirt and some awful-looking clay pendants”) and going (“She should spend as much time on her lectures as she does on her outfits”). And lest you think it’s only our students who police our fashion, remember the flak Elaine Showalter took for ‘coming out of the closet’ as a fashionista in the Dec 1997 Vogue? “I was once so desperate for a shopping fix at a Salzburg seminar on gender that I visited a dirndl factory,” she confesses. Condemnation was swift and brutal. Showalter’s irresponsibility – her betrayal of the sisterhood, her callous consumerism – was the talk of the academic gossip circuits, briefly. Warning taken: if you read Vogue and your teaching evaluations, keep it to yourself.

Fortunately, web 2.0 means that if we find ourselves confounded by our closets or confused about consumption, we can turn to the growing world of academic fashion bloggers for help. Threadbared, hautest of the academic couture blogs, discusses “the politics, aesthetics, histories, theories, cultures and subcultures that go by the names ‘fashion’ and ‘beauty.’” Others are more practical. AcademiChic is produced by “Three feminist PhD candidates at a Midwest university, on a crusade against the ill-fitting polyester suit of academic yore,” while The Glamourous Grad Student will tell you how to look good on fifty dollars a year (or, in her words, “share how I balance a grad student stipend with a desire for magic in my life and wardrobe”). My personal favourite is Fashion for Nerds, “Bringing Style to Science, One Outfit at a Time.” Characterized by the familiar generousity of the blogosphere as well as its DIY ethos, these blogs focus on how academic women can put together work-ready outfits by combining off-the-rack purchases from H&M or Banana Republic with vintage finds and the comfortable shoes you already own. They are not preachy – the bloggers use themselves as examples, focusing on what they like about the outfits they wear – but most posts include references to the origin of pieces just like a regular fashion magazine spread might. It suggests their followers find such advice necessary.

Do we know enough to steer between the Scylla of not-pretty-enough and the Charybdis of not-smart-enough? Let me distil our bloggers’ advice, along with observations from two decades in the academy, in a list of Do’s and Don’ts for the Professorial Woman:

• Do shop locally. (Exception: Matt & Nat. A Matt & Nat bag could be driven around the world in a Hummer that runs on the blood of the spotted owl and it would still be sacrosanct. Ditto clothing from Mountain Equipment Co-op.) Don’t shop big box stores. (Except Winners is okay, and the aforementioned H&M, and Banana Republic, and Club Monaco, and Anthropologie, and HBC and Sears.)

• Do look sharp, energetic, and youthful, but don’t look like your students. How? Search out the section of the mall not devoted to turning women into girls, while avoiding the stuff your elderly piano teacher used to wear. Hint: if you’re surrounded by cougars and MILFs you’re getting warmer.

• Do dress in a way that commands respect. However, don’t appear too corporate: remember, you don’t want to look like you work in PR. A jacket is okay, a cardigan preferable. A suit is a no-no, unless you’re gunning for an administrative position, in which case you fail the “smart enough” test. Canadian academics prefer tights to hose, boots to pumps, and skirts or pants to dresses. Blacks, blues and browns are safest, although you don’t want to appear too monochromatic. And don’t wear too much black or you’ll be taken for an artiste.

• Do cultivate a bluestocking look to prove you’re intelligent and appropriately gendered, i.e., neither head-turningly feminine nor inattentively androgynous. (If you’re intentionally butch, don’t worry, your students will discipline you on ratemyprofessor.) Don’t advertise your sexuality: no heels higher than two inches, no extreme makeup, no bling, no ink, no piercings, no cosmetic procedures. Do consider the academic bob, which will mark you as safely, permanently, numbingly middle-aged. Do wear funky glasses, the signature look for the brainy woman, but don’t wear funky hats (not white enough).

Got it?

If you’re able to walk that fine line, if you can strut your stuff on the academic runway without losing your balance in the face of blinding surveillance by students, colleagues, administrators and the general public, you might be tempted to make academic fashion the next feminist front. I’m tempted, regularly. But to what end? For the right to sit in fusty libraries wearing motheaten sweaters? Or to walk to meetings in Christian Louboutins? Don’t get me wrong: I want to work in a place with more kaftans and Pumas, nose rings and suits, and smart trousers on transmen. But let’s shuffle this up the priority line only after women start earning a hundred cents on the dollar.

Meanwhile, let’s agree that most days it’s enough to brush your hair.

Virginia made me

reading three guineas at an impressionable age left me with a deep distrust of ritual. i couldn't go to convocations. funeral rites creeped me out. i still have a hard time chanting at protest marches. i can't even do the soccer cheer before a game: "3-2-1-snipers!," i mouth. but of all of these, nothing was so suspicion-inducing as marriage.

well, today's news is that after decades of principled objections to marriage as a hetero/sexist institution, and years of scorning gay marriage, i have put down my bow of burning gold. i've decided i am in favour of gay weddings. the way i see it -- now -- life's too short to dismiss other people's happiness. people want to marry. they want a wedding. for reasons passing my understanding, they want to organize flowers and families so they can stand in front of a crowd of people and say aloud the kinds of things i've always thought best whispered in someone's ear, or uttered to end an argument, or stumbled over in a home depot aisle.

gay weddings show culture morphing and changing. we'll take this aspect of the tradition, but no thanks, not the 'wife' bit. we'll say what we think the basis of a strong relationship is (in connie and val's case, the integrity of individuality and a commitment to sympathetic engagement with each other, which is about as good a definition as i've heard) -- and then we'll make the state sanction it. it's bold and creative, when you think about it. does it solve the issue of disproportionate state goods going to coupled people? does marriage, reworked, shed its baggage of dispossessing women of their personhood? does it undo monogamy's dyadic structuring of desire? of course not. but it turns out you never get tired of hearing the line "by the power vested in me by the province of alberta." it's all i can do not to throw my fist in the air and say, 'take that, fascist fucks!'

more profoundly, i think we can thank gay weddings, along with drag king culture, for a revitalization of butch fashion. people dress for a wedding. the girls looked good, of course (and val was resplendent), but the real treat of last night's soiree was the dudes. there were turquoise shirts with suspenders. there were tight dark vests over proper white shirts. there were cuff links. there were suits. there were funky glasses and short haircuts and brogues. there were ties. there were stripes: thin white stripes and thick white stripes and oxford stripes and pinstripes. there were boots, and there was leather, and there were hats -- so many hats! -- and exquisite manners everywhere. there were dudes with dudes, and there were dudes on their own, and some of them danced with their ladies and some of them danced with the family, and none of them danced with the buxom rugby player from connie's team, which was just fine since it turned out she and her equally zaftig husband could cut quite a rug when the hiphop was playing.

to tell you the truth, it was all very queer.

Seduced by feminism

i was talking last night with my friend susanne about becoming a feminist. the setting was ironic, perhaps: we were at a fashion show with chic girls and pretty boys in their irritatingly early 20s. my modern vintage t-straps had me in agony, which i thought would be sexier than it was. i didn't realize that at this fashion show we'd be standing all night, and i didn't realize that "all night" would be as long as it was. when the invite said doors at 7, i thought that meant show at 8, so i had my friend renee pick me up at 7:30. suffice it to say, we pretty much opened the party. and so, here i was, three hours later, with pain radiating up and down my spine and the mortifying thought that i was going to have to take my shoes right off, as if i was at a wedding reception in a community hall and not at a fashion show at an independent gallery.

anyway, having chosen the best boy-outfit and the best girl-outfit, having outed the boots that were trying too hard and exhausted the treats table, talk turned to whether we'd ever imagined a career in the fashion industry. me, i grew up idolizing long-haul truck drivers. susanne's parents, it turns out, were in the high-end retail business in germany. the upshot was the same: neither of us fancied a career in fashion, both of us became professors. but was style absent? susanne described her first women's studies prof, a redhead the same age as her mother but who wore black leather, played in a rock band, and dated women. even by the standards of 1980s berlin, she was cool.

i was similarly seduced by the lifestyle of the intellectual class. i graduated from high school in 1984 here in edmonton and headed straight to university. i had figured out by that point that i wanted to teach. i didn't care for children and barely survived junior high the first time around, but perhaps i could become a professor. it must be said that in 1984 i had no idea what "being a professor" meant. nonetheless, as soon as i hit on this idea, i knew it was for me. i imagined long periods of reflective study punctuated by socrates-like sessions with devotees; i saw fierce arguments in smoky bars; i pictured myself toiling away on a misunderstood masterpiece all alone in a garrett. we didn't have garretts in edmonton, as far as i knew, so this life would pretty much have to take place elsewhere, probably toronto. once i was a feminist, my imagination became sharper: i imagined coming home after a long day in the library to a tiny apartment redolent with garlic and steamy with pasta, all made by my live-in boyfriend. what can i say? it was the 80s; we ate a lot of pasta, and "common-law" felt radical. i'm getting ahead of myself a little, but it's a measure of my misplaced idealism that i most wanted to become a grad student after reading margaret atwood's the edible woman.

from my vantage point as an eager undergraduate, my professors' lives did appear to conform to my dreamy notions. it's about 1986, a saturday night, and my boyfriend and i are milling around in the now-defunct weinlos books, attending a reception for a visiting poet. i can't remember who it was now -- bp nichol, perhaps. anyway, the talk was all about the canadian long poem. talk? arguments, impassioned ones, among poets, professors, book merchants, and grad students. i didn't have the first clue how to participate in the conversation, but i covertly purchased a copy of the 1979 long poem anthology that night and set to work on it. the book was edited by michael ondaatje, the "early michael ondaatje," we have to say now, the ondaatje of coming through slaughter and there's a trick with a knife i'm learning to do. ondaatje's always been sexy, but he used to be our very own pretty boy.

however, not even michael ondaatje was as sexy as mid-80s canadian feminism. in those heady days, women's studies was just being established at the UofA. in keeping with feminism's commitment to inclusiveness, undergraduates were encouraged to get involved in the hiring decisions. we didn't have the first clue what we were doing. there was a fantastic quebecoise up for the job of chair whose expertise was labour movements among immigrant seamstresses in montreal, but we collectively pooh-poohed that in favour of the candidate who studied Women's Spirituality. c'mon: woman-centred spirituality? for a girl just five years out of braemar baptist church, that was pretty bold. though i didn't use that term exactly. "hers is a more gynocentric approach," i recall saying, knowingly.

anyway, of all the exciting things going on, nothing was more exciting than the book launch for shirley neuman's anthology a mazing space. to give you a sense of how long ago this was, the gerund was not yet ubiquitous in academic titles. there are images of clam shells and spirals superimposed on the pages of the book, which was designed by one of shirley's husbands. can i say that again?: one of shirley's husbands. she was like edmonton's elizabeth taylor. most scandalously of all, there's an essay in the book called "how the cunt lost its tongue." i was agog. "cunt"? in an academic book? you can do that? it was the linguistic equivalent of susanne's teacher's punk haircut.

the launch of a mazing space was held at garneau books (now a high-end CD store). it was the first book launch i'd ever been invited to, and i had no idea what to expect. i thought for sure it would take the whole evening. i thought there would be a formal program. i thought it might be like the symphony, with dignitaries, speeches. i was quite surprised to discover that a book launch amounted to a whole lot of wine-drinking and milling about. kind of like a fashion show, come to think of it, only i was wearing doc martens. these people -- my people -- were so blase about the intellectual life that they could squander it in small talk and boxed wine.

nothing could have seduced me more.