Jeans, Blazers, and Qualitative Evidence

Last Wednesday I ended 10 days of wearing pink for the Blogging for Breast Cancer AWEARness challenge, (I only managed to get outfit photos of 7) with jeans, blazer, and loafers.  I felt a little bit like one of my favorite undergraduate professors and one of my dissertation committee members.  Both men almost always wear jeans, a button down, and a blazer and bike to campus even in the ice and snow.  Because of them I tend to think of the jeans and blazer combination as one variation on the quintessentially scholarly look. 

 Jeans - Express (remixed), Blouse - BCBG (remixed), Blazer - Rafaella (remixed), Bonnie Loafers - John Fluevog (remixed), Purse - Nine West (remixed), Sunnies - Vera Wang (via the Wang Stork and remixed)

This was only the second time I had worn jeans into campus this semester.  (The first was for an 8am Friday morning department meeting, and half of my colleagues were in jeans for it.)  I do wear jeans in the classroom, but, since I started teaching my own classes several years ago, I usually wait until several weeks into the term.  I also tend to prefer them for days when I'm planning to do more discussion than lecturing in class, which was the plan for last Wednesday.  As a young female academic, I think it's necessary to delineate some of the boundaries between myself and my students.  I wonder if jeans read so casually that they can break some of those barriers down...?  Bailey at least seems to think so.  I offer as completely unscientific qualitative evidence the fact that the moment I walked downstairs in my jeans that morning she jumped up on me uninvited -- usually she doesn't pay any attention to us when we're in the house.

The topic of jeans in the classroom is one that we've visited in the past here on Fashionable Academics, but it's been awhile, and we have many new readers since then.  So I ask: do you wear jeans in the classroom or to your office?  Do your departmental colleagues wear jeans?  If you don't, why not?  Is it because of a dress code or because you think they're too casual for the workplace?  If the latter, why do you read them as too casual for the work place?