The Professional Frump Factor

Working as a legal assistant in New York before grad school, I remember the elegant procession of pressed pants, suit jackets and skirts as I exited the Wall Street subway station every morning. The suit-and-tie uniform seemed incongruously conservative by modern standards of dress, but it manifested the basic marketing maxim that presentation matters, that it reflects the product.

I used to gaze lovingly at the colored ties and white-collar shirts in the Brooks Brothers display window and brave the maze of Europeans at Century 21 during lunch breaks. There was a unique satisfaction in turning a necessity — at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs — into an art. When I came to Ithaca my options were of course more limited (the Bon Ton, Abercrombie or the Gap) and most of the clothes I owned I could no longer wear lest I look ridiculously overdressed, but there is more to the story than that.

In academia, “fashion” is to some intellectuals what “feminism” is to Rush Limbaugh; it’s “the f-word.” As Project Runway personality and Parsons professor Tim Gunn told The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I really believe that disdain for fashion is something that [academics] are quite proud of, and that they want to demonstrate it in what they’re wearing and how they’re wearing it.”

In the interview, Gunn pointed out that this disdain for fashion is “almost studied”: the dusty piles of books, papers and the dank apartment create their own aesthetic, as scrupulously put together as a runway model. To boil it down, anti-fashion is still fashion.

It is something that certain departments take to more easily than others. There is a spectrum in academia. As a general rule, the hard sciences stand on one end of the spectrum, and on the other, the humanities (you may infer which endpoint is labeled “frump”).

Of course there are dapper professors, meticulously coiffed and put together (the entire Linguistics department, for instance), but we have all also seen the professor with an overgrown nest of hair, glasses that belong in the ’70s and pants that two people could fit in. For these, the lack of personal grooming reflects a basic philosophy: ideas matter and appearances do not. It is an iconoclastic statement against superficiality, perhaps consumerism and conspicuous consumption.

As it happens I have never quite understood what was meant when someone criticized fashion for being superficial; depth is artifice as well. (I also wonder whether brushing one’s teeth would fall into this same category.) But I think it implies a false dichotomy between fashion and intellect — fashion as material and frivolous, ideas as transcendent. As a response, I would turn to Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life, which attempted to convince 19th century painters to garb their figures in the dress of the times, to distill eternal beauty from the transitory. Or to use Coco Chanel’s more pithy formulation: “fashion passes, style remains.”

Being critical of conspicuous consumption is fair. It is one thing to succumb to ostentatious displays of wealth; but it is another to take an interest in one’s appearance. Gunn also argued that dressing well does not require a lot of money, the easiest explanation for the Wall Street-Academia sartorial disparity. Dressing well does not mean buying $200 shirts or $1,000 coat, but clothes that fit, perhaps a haircut. The unkempt look is less an expression of poverty than of values.

To the socially conscious who oppose what fashion stands for or the system that it supports — blind consumerism, materialism or capitalistic oppression — I would argue that these are structural problems that are in no way alleviated by continuing to wear sweaters with holes in them. Much of the harshest criticism is levied at haute couture, but I would suspect that high fashion is actually less guilty of social injustice than the manufactured clothing of chain stores (remember the K-Mart-Kathie Lee Gifford sweatshop controversy).

Professors are not the only ones who grace the Ho Plaza runway. Undergraduates — the least embedded in academia — display more variety in their fashion choices than graduate students, who are professors in training. Among undergrads one finds skaters, hippies, preppies and the girls who come to class in pajamas with a Louis Vuitton bag on their arm. Some graduate students (I cannot speak for professors) regard undergrad fashion with contempt; it reminds us of the parent-supported privilege we no longer enjoy. Perhaps this is the origin of the intellectual snobbery that downgrades fashion, perhaps not.

But taking ideas seriously does not entail ignoring one’s appearance. Dressing well reflects a respect for the profession and the endeavor at hand. We are no longer in a dress-code era and Cornell’s campus will never look like The Dead Poet's Society, but when attending a lecture, it would be nice not to be distracted by the lecturer’s half tucked-in shirt.

Gabriel Arana is a graduate student in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at garana@cornellsun.com [1]. The Red Line appears Thursdays.