Welcome to another installment of Fashion is... (see here, here, here, and here for the other guest posts by Sal, Kyla, Chelsea, and Audi). In this series, I've been trying to explore the multiplicity of meanings behind the idea of fashion and personal style, to try to get to the heart of the "why do we dress/care/blog?" question. I'm thrilled to have Tania of What Would a Nerd Wear posting here today on the role of fashion in academia. Tania has an incredibly sense of style, an incredible writing voice, and a completely accessible, she's-already-your-best-friend attitude and personality.
Like any literature student who once read Cleanth Brooks, I am fascinated by paradox, and the subject “fashion is academic” is as paradoxical as it comes, for me. On the one hand, fashion is academic precisely because everything is academic to the academic. Academics put their analytical skills to work for just about anything: The Bachelor is an acute display of commodity fetishism; parenting becomes an act of navigating everything you know about Freud; an argument with your roommate is narrated in the terms of a novel you’ve been reading lately; oh, and that scene in The Shining where Jack Nicholson throws a tennis ball against the wall for hours at a stretch? It’s starting to sound a lot like writing a dissertation.
In many ways, fashion is no exception. Fashion is academic, because I am an academic. Because I think and read and write like an academic, my scholarship is always implicated in my ideas about clothes. Because I am interested in how writers narrate personality, I am also interested in how clothing is a way to narrate a character. Naturally, I see dressing myself in the morning as one of the ways I narrate myself. It’s part of the story I tell about myself, but just one part, like Mrs. Dalloway might say, how she “drew the parts together, she alone knew how different, how incompatible and composed so for the world only into one centre, one diamond.” So this “one centre” that shows itself via my outward appearance is also a specious one, because it narrates a kind of cohesive self that I don’t really feel I inhabit.
And yet, fashion is also decidedly not academic. It is, according to the critical voice in my head, vain, silly, or un-serious. But its lightness is also one of the reasons why I love it. It is my hobby which is entirely separate from the English department—a rare and wonderful thing considering that all my other extracurriculars have reading lists and most of my friends are also academics. It is a relief to have a community who isn’t judging my love of a good pair of jeans or my anxiety about what to wear to teach. Teaching in a small department in a small town sometimes feels like living in the panopticon—someone is always watching. And for a while, my blog was a place of my very own; oddly, it was the most private part of my life even though it was also clearly the most public.
This post comes at a strange time for me, when the collision of fashion and academia seems particularly germane. Having recently realized that several of my colleagues found What Would a Nerd Wear and know my stylish little secret, I feel confronted more than usual with reconciling the relationship between my life as a scholar and my sometimes-frivolous-but-mostly-wonderful explorations with my wardrobe, my readers, and other style writers.
In the end, I remain stuck between these two experiences: fashion as an academic pursuit and fashion as the part of my life which is unrelated to my academic pursuits. Unable to reconcile these contradictory experiences of style, I’ll settle, happily, with paradox.
