by Jon Lackman | 5 February 2010 | Uncategorized
We recently discovered that the Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture launched a blog in June of last year, Enfilade. One recent entertaining entry concerns “Academics and the F-Word” [i.e. fashion]:
With the spring conference season here once more, many of us will soon find ourselves rummaging in the closet with an open suitcase on the floor, asking ourselves what an art historian should look like now … Academic Chic offers a fascinating glimpse at the unique challenges professors and college instructors face. In the site’s own words: “Three feminist PhD candidates at a Midwest university, on a crusade against the ill-fitting polyester suit of academic yore.” They continue:
We are three Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, who believe that academia and fashion are not at odds. When beginning graduate school we each had an existential wardrobe crisis. What does one wear in grad school anyway? We recognized that our undergraduate hoodies and jeans were no longer appropriate but were unwilling to accept the shoulder-padded khaki polyester suit that was ubiquitous among our female professors. As feminist scholars, we were also forced to reconcile the perceived-superficiality of our interest in style with our academic commitment to questioning gender and class essentialisms.
Today, in the face of all our eye-rolling colleagues, we defiantly wear dresses, fitted jackets, and pointy toe shoes. To teach in. And sometimes just to the library!
Medievalists trying to be Modernists? If you teach well, no one cares how you dress.
Where would we be without pointy toe shoes?