When I first started my tenure-track job at a public university, I was determined to play the part of young academic on the go. I would dress professionally so that I would be taken seriously! I would wear my glasses so that no one would think me too young! I would shop for attractive clothing and wear it in the classroom!
Week after week I would trot out my hand-me-down pencil skirts and silk blouses, my wrap dresses and heels, my beautifully-cut Italian suit (half off at Saks Off Fifth!) that got me through MLA in style. No jeans, no t-shirts, no apologies. I shopped at discount places to find the pieces I needed; I tried to freshen up my blazer/jean/boot look to take myself from grad assistant to prof.
As the months whisked past, I realized something.
People really notice how you dress, particularly and surprisingly in academia. My students, particularly the female students, feel very comfortable exclaiming over my shoes or my dress or my latest hair color choices. A few of the young men have also said things like "You look nice today!" While early on I would thank them before wondering whether they ever complimented their male professors this way, I have since taken to just saying "thanks" and moving on. Colleagues are the same way, it turns out. It became a department joke that I was some sort of fashionista clothes horse. When we were offered lanyards for our uni IDs, the chair of our department mentioned, "Well, I think it's safe to say that Megarita will not be caught dead wearing these!" A few other younger professors raised eyebrows, but they were in the minority as the department laughed at "how true!"
Fashion, especially what might be scare-quotedly termed feminine fashion, it seemed, gave me a label. "Young." "Harmless." "Not serious." The bar for fashion is so low in most departments, most universities, that the sight of a pair of stockings sets off klaxons. I am not a supermodel. I am not a fashionista. I am simply a woman who will wear a dress to work every now and again because it looks nice and more put together than jeans.
This is a not a woe-is-me sixteenth-wave feminism diatribe. It's just a note that we few, we happy few "fashionable academics" are noticeable. I've found this to be to my advantage. I class up the joint! I raise the bar! And I still do it because my clothing is my ethos. My dresses and heels are my uniform to face the slavering hordes in battle for 75 minutes several times a day. One good suit can create more conversations than 10 compelling conference papers. The face I choose to present to my workplace is polished and a smidgen meow. Because I know when it comes down to it, my tenure folder only loves me for my mind.
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