Look Smart
How professors bring their personal style to the workplace
The runways of fashion and the realm of academia are often considered poles of the intellectual spectrum: the former is condemned as effeminate and superficial, while the latter is treated with distance for its unflinching seriousness.
Professors in particular have succumbed to widespread stereotypes: the tweed, the Oxfords, the thick glasses, the Marx-style beard. Ph.D. candidacy is a heady—and expensive—process, and one that is not above competitions of seriousness. And of course it would be a shame if all a student remembered from his four undergraduate years was his professor’s towering pair of Christian Louboutins.
But that does not mean that style and school are irreconcilable. “I think it’s very old-fashioned and inaccurate to think of university professors—as many people still do —as sartorially inept,” Sarah Cole, associate professor of English and comparative literature, says. “I can call immediately to mind many colleagues—in my own department and around Columbia—who are interested in fashion, have great personal style, and look terrific in their clothes.”
On CULPA, Cole is praised not only for her openness to discussion, but also for her style. “If this were a high school yearbook and I was giving out superlatives, Cole would definitely win for best-dressed,” writes an anonymous reviewer of her modern British literature course. “Her up-to-the-minute fashion sense and phenomenal physique will leave you wondering how she ever had the time to receive her Ph.D.”
While Cole hesitates to pin down her precise fashion style, she effectively articulates the compatibility of clothes and classes. “If a person likes clothes, and is interested in fashion,” she says, “teaching at a university is a great job, since students are often creatively fashionable in their own right, and because it gives one a wide latitude for choice.”
Clad in a gray wool mini-dress, opaque black tights, and boots, Cole manages a balance of casual and formal. “I like to dress nicely when I teach,” she says. “I never wear jeans in the classroom, for instance, though I live in jeans the rest of the time, but I also like to be a bit casual—I never wear suits, either.”
Matthew Wallenfang, assistant professor of biological sciences at Barnard, similarly acknowledges that clothes are an important part of his presentation as a professor. “I definitely dress differently on non-teaching days then I do on teaching days,” he says. “Today it’s jeans and a polo shirt, whereas on teaching days I tend not to wear jeans.”
“You can’t help but think of how you’re being perceived visually by the students when you are on a stage, and there are 190 people there,” Wallenfang says. “Self-consciousness is just part of what goes along with, I think, teaching a large intro class [to Molecular and Cellular Biology]. I try not to let it be kind of an overwhelming part of what I’m thinking about, but it certainly does factor in.”
Though he does not mind the casual 9 a.m. attire in which students attend his class, Wallenfang maintains the importance of his own appearance to the efficacy of his teaching. “If I were to show up in whatever I rolled out of bed in,” he says, “it would convey the sense to the students that it wasn’t anything different than what’s going on in their dorm room.”
Hiromi Noguchi, associate professor in East Asian languages and cultures and a doctoral candidate at Teacher’s College, regards the abundance of pajamas as an American phenomenon. “It would never happen in Japan,” she says, explaining that in Asia, there is much greater pressure for people, and particularly for women, to dress in a presentable manner.
Cultural influence and her Japanese origin thus play a significant role in Noguchi’s own presentation. “I want students to see me as one example of Japanese culture,” she says.
In reference to her own carefully chosen outfit, which today consists of a brown-silk skirt and a similarly colored sweater, Noguchi says, “I’m just trying to match the color and look put-together.”
Despite the emphasis on trends in both Japan and the United States, Noguchi reports that her style has changed little over the years. “I have more money now than before,” she says, laughing, “so rather than Old Navy and Gap, I can go to Banana Republic now, that’s all.”
“I don’t copy people,” she says. “I pick clothing whenever I like it.”
-Additional Reporting by Emily Rauber