Over the past sixty years the American professor stopped dressing to mark distance from students and started dressing to mark distance from administrators, consultants, and money. In the 1960s the jacket and tie helped make the professor visible as a professor. By the end of the century, authority could survive open collars, sweaters, jeans, T-shirts, beards, sneakers, and deliberate eccentricity. The profession gained sartorial discretion and lost a uniform.
A longitudinal study of Duke University yearbooks makes the transition measurable. The 1965 Chanticleer photographed the people heading Duke’s academic departments. Twenty-four of the 25 wore neckwear. Twenty-three wore conventional ties and one wore a bow tie. Eighteen wore civilian jackets or blazers. The sample contained no open collars, T-shirts, beards, or hair reaching the collar. Among the named academic adults in the 1970 Chanticleer, conventional ties appeared on 12 of the 18 people whose neckwear could be judged. By 1975, the comparable number was six of 12. T-shirts appeared. Five of 11 observable faculty had hair reaching the collar. Three had beards. In the 1990 Chanticleer faculty sample, only two of 12 observable professors wore conventional ties, while eight of 11 showed open collars.
The old costume dissolved by components. The tie became optional before the jacket. Open collars spread before jackets disappeared. Long hair and beards arrived after tie optionality was already visible. Formal and countercultural elements could then be recombined. A professor could wear a tie with long hair, a jacket with an open collar, a beard with a blazer, or a T-shirt with enough academic authority that nobody needed an explanation.
That Duke evidence comes from a ChatGPT coding project. Each garment variable was coded present, absent, or not observable. Missing visual information stayed missing. The study separately recorded photographic setting because a formal publicity portrait, office photograph, classroom scene, laboratory image, outdoor candid, and deliberately comic portrait create different opportunities for clothing. Selection mechanism was also kept separate because a rank-defined roster of department heads differs from an editor’s selection of interesting personalities.
A 1969 Virginia Tech thesis, Nancy Garland Dearing’s “Selected clothing practices of male university professors,” surveyed 440 male professors about what they wore and sorted the answers by age, rank, and field. Faculty over fifty, whose clothing closely resembled that of full professors, were the likeliest to wear suits, white shirts, ties, wing tips, and tweed or corduroy jackets. The youngest professors favored turtlenecks, colored oxford shirts, open collars, sweaters, loafers, beards, cuffless trousers, and jackets removed in class. Business professors owned the most expensive suits and were especially likely to keep their jackets on. Natural scientists favored sweaters and open-neck shirts. Architects favored tweed, corduroy, and bow ties. Engineers wore ties but bought cheaper suits and removed their jackets in class.
Dearing caught the professoriate immediately before its visual grammar fragmented. The differences by field already matter. The natural scientist and business professor inhabited different occupational worlds. Academic casualization therefore began from several baselines. A law professor dealing with judges, alumni, clients, and practicing lawyers lived closer to the suit. A laboratory scientist could remove the jacket. An architect could convert formality into tweed. A literary intellectual could make refusal of commercial polish into part of the intellectual persona.
The old costume distinguished the professor from two neighboring elites. Gray flannel, oxford cloth, tweed, knit or rep tie, leather shoes, perhaps the famous leather elbow patch, made him look respectable without looking commercial. He was a gentleman of modest means. The banker’s smooth worsted suit and the salesman’s shiny prosperity were as wrong as the undergraduate’s sweatshirt.
Mid-century faculty and elite students often shared a formality. A jacket and tie did not always say “professor rather than student.” It could say adult, respectable, educated, male, institutional, and middle or upper-middle class. Universities enforced dress expectations on students as well as faculty. College students had already contributed greatly to the invention of American casual clothing, but formal campus spaces remained formal.
The social revolution of the late 1960s changed the reference groups. The younger cohort hired during the great university expansion of the 1960s and 1970s wore jeans, work shirts, corduroy, turtlenecks, boots, beards, and open collars as student dress codes collapsed and political identification with the Vietnam-era establishment became toxic in many academic fields. Casual dress signaled solidarity with students, labor, artistic bohemia, or the counterculture.
The crucial movement was relational. The professor could distinguish himself from businessmen and administrators by looking closer to students. Academic informality communicated distance from one hierarchy by borrowing the costume of another group.
In November 1970 the Harvard Faculty Club was holding a referendum on whether to retain its coat-and-tie rule. Nobel laureate George Wald called the requirement “ridiculous,” “embarrassing,” “anachronistic,” and “stuffy.” One defender of the rule wrote, “Keep out the riff-raff.” Another suggested that Harvard should encourage individuality, prompting the reply, “Individuality? yes, in the color of ties.” Two years earlier the undergraduate Houses had stopped requiring coats and ties at dinner.
The humor of the referendum comes from a status system recognizing that its signals were losing consensus. The tie had once been ordinary enough to disappear into the background. By 1970 wearing or refusing it could express a position.
The University of Virginia recorded the same transition through an almost perfect anecdote. Its institutional history describes professors going barefoot and a Berkeley-trained assistant professor being mistaken for a disheveled student. A senior professor saw the young man outside his office and sent a secretary to tell the supposed student to make himself presentable. The secretary returned with the news that he was the new assistant professor of physics.
Clothes had once provided enough information to sort professor from student. Now they could mislead.
Duke lets us see that casual professors existed before the institutional costume collapsed. The 1965 yearbook organized its Faculty section around department chairmen who coordinated staffs and academic programs, linked faculty with administration, and represented the university’s academic excellence. The photographs then represented those officeholders through an overwhelmingly formal code. Twenty-four of 25 wear neckwear.
Elsewhere in the same volume, Duke ran a Campus Personalities feature. Peter Klopfer, a zoology professor, appears in a short-sleeve open-collar shirt with no jacket or tie. The prose describes his intellect, humor, scientific curiosity, classroom style, and participation in civil-rights marches. Reynolds Price appears as an intense young creative-writing teacher. Robert Durden is remembered for his pipe, vest, bow tie, boutonniere, and informal manner. Richard Leach appears as an associate professor whose easygoing manner carries into his teaching.
The formal 1965 university therefore contained several professorial types. Institutional office compressed them into a narrow costume. Personality representation let some differences through.
That is why the 1965 Duke Chanticleer result cannot support the sentence “professors wore ties.” Rather, when Duke’s yearbook represented academic institutional authority through department heads, almost everybody wore neckwear.
The 1970 Chanticleer changes both the clothes and the editorial machinery. Its academic sequence mixes professors, departments, deans, teaching scenes, offices, outdoor photographs, and activity portraits. W. B. Peach appears in jacket and tie. Henry Fairbank is photographed sitting on a car in a sweater. Thomas Langford wears a tie without a jacket. Peter Klopfer again appears in a short-sleeve open-collar shirt. Richard Kramer teaches at a blackboard without a tie. Buford Jones remains fully formal outdoors.
Conventional ties fall to 12 of 18 observable academic adults. Jackets remain on ten of 17. Open collars appear in three of 16. Yet hair reaching the collar remains zero among 20 observable people, and beards remain zero.
That finding overturns one of the attractive stories with which the project began. Long hair does not lead the transition in these Duke samples. The tie is already losing its obligatory character while hair remains visually conventional.
The Duke coding therefore separated environmental portraits, staged activities, and documentary candids. Among those comparable photographic modes, conventional ties appear on about 67 percent of observable academic adults in the 1970 Chanticleer. In the 1975 Chanticleer the raw comparable rate falls to about 45 percent. Reweighting the 1975 photographs so their mix of photographic modes matches 1970 raises the estimate only to about 51 percent. The decline remains.
Jackets tell a different story. After the same adjustment, 1975 jacket prevalence is roughly the same as 1970. Open collars rise.
The suit-and-tie package decomposed. The tie lost compulsory force early. The jacket survived as an adaptable garment that could bridge old and new codes. A professor could retain the jacket while abandoning the tie. The jacket could then coexist with an open collar, beard, long hair, unusual shirt, or casual trousers.
The 1975 Chanticleer makes that recombination visible. Victor Strandberg wears a jacket and striped tie with hair reaching his collar. Martin Miller wears a short-sleeve open-collar shirt with longer hair and a full beard. Janis Antonovics appears in a greenhouse in a T-shirt with longer hair. Frank Borchardt teaches in a jacket over an open-neck shirt with a beard. Charles Berquist sits in his office with his feet up on his desk. Roger Corless appears in a cafeteria in an open-collar shirt with beard and longer hair.
Allan Bone remains formal between 1965 and 1970. Peter Klopfer remains casual. Buford Jones remains formal between 1970 and 1975.
George Pearsall supplies the most valuable changing case. In 1970 he is represented as Dean of Engineering and wears a conventional tie. Twenty years later, in the 1990 Chanticleer, he appears as a professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science wearing an ordinary open-collar shirt with no jacket.
Pearsall changes across time, but he also changes represented role. The same person can carry different visual obligations when the image says “dean” and when it says “professor.”
The strongest test of this distinction comes from the 1970 yearbook. After the academic sequence, the volume presents senior university administrators. The chancellor pro tem, president, provost, vice president, deans, and registrar produce ten jackets out of ten. All nine whose neckwear is clearly observable wear conventional ties.
The academics in the same book are much less uniform. Same university. Same year. Same student publication. Same surrounding culture. The major difference is the role being represented.
The president, dean, department chair, provost, and registrar embody offices. Their photographs communicate organizational authority. Clothing helps make the office legible. A scholar’s authority increasingly comes from another bundle of credentials: publications, tenure, disciplinary reputation, grants, prizes, endowed titles, expertise, citation, and classroom recognition. As those signals strengthen, the clothes can carry less of the burden.
The result also explains why administrators often remain formally dressed after faculty casualize. The administrator benefits from looking like the institution. The professor may eventually benefit from showing distance from it.
Different professions became differently informal. Dearing’s 1969 data already show business professors dressing differently from natural scientists and architects. The relevant boundary was occupational. A law professor who met judges, clients, alumni, and practicing lawyers lived closer to the suit. A physicist could remove it. An architect could replace it with tweed. A literary theorist could make refusing it part of the theory.
Harvard Law School later produced an almost laboratory-quality example. Douglas Ginsburg joined the faculty in the 1970s and, according to a 1987 Los Angeles Times profile, continued wearing suits and ties to class through a period when colleagues remembered him as strikingly untouched by the political and cultural upheavals around him. Duncan Kennedy of Critical Legal Studies went in the opposite direction. A 1992 Vanity Fair account described Kennedy’s black turtleneck, jeans, work boots, and beard as part of his challenge to the traditional Harvard professor’s role. Same institution, same profession, same broad generation. Ginsburg retained the visual language of courts, government, and professional authority. Kennedy dressed against it.
By 1990, Duke’s Chanticleer has an Academics section that presents professors as intellectual personalities. Frank Lentricchia talks about teaching, Duke undergraduates, the English department, Durham, and the intellectual controversies surrounding his field. Kristine Stiles discusses scholarship, teaching, art, and the relation between them. Bruce Lawrence talks about research, classroom preparation, history, religion, expertise, and the work of faculty. George Pearsall talks about engineering education.
Open collars, sweaters, and casual jackets sit comfortably beside serious discussions of scholarship and teaching. Faculty casualness has ceased to look oppositional. A behavior has completed its transition when observers stop needing a story about why it occurred.
The 1990 student comparison strengthens the point. The fixed sample of 20 editor-selected student portraits contains three instances of neckwear if the bow tie is included, while the faculty sample contains two conventional ties among 12 observable professors. Jackets are also surprisingly close in raw prevalence.
The similar garments sometimes carry different meanings. Students use formal clothes theatrically. Lawrence Glazer wears a bow tie and formal jacket. Douglas Perlman wears a matching dark suit and tie. Karen Weaver combines a plaid blazer and loose tie with a T-shirt. Formality has become one style among other available student performances.
Faculty casualness is quieter. Pearsall wears an open shirt. Edward Hill wears a polo. David Paletz wears a sweater over an open collar.
The visual institution changes alongside the clothes. In 1965 the faculty section explains the hierarchy. In 1970 professors appear in environments and activities. By 1975 documentary sequences show academics teaching, sitting, eating, working, and relaxing. The 1980 Chanticleer no longer gives Faculty, Administration, or Academics their old formal categories in the table of contents.
When Academics reappears in 1990, the editorial object is the intellectual personality. By 2000, it becomes the stylized academic personality. The 2000 Chanticleer photographs Jairo Moreno through a mirror, George Gopen holding a book, Steve Nowicki juggling outdoors, the Nightingales together among flowering branches, and Michael Montague-Smith leaning against a work surface in jeans.
The 2000 clothing results are another warning against fitting a smooth decline. Three of eight profiles wear conventional ties, a rebound from 1990. Formal clothing survives and can return.
The ranks also damage the simple status theory. Jairo Moreno is an assistant professor and wears no tie or jacket. David W. Johnson is an instructor and wears a tie. Steve Nowicki is an endowed associate professor and appears in a sweatshirt while juggling. George Gopen and Richard Stubbing, both carrying professor-level practice titles, wear jackets and ties.
Women entered this transformation under different conditions. Stanford supplies a perfect sentence. When Myra Strober arrived in 1972 as one of the Graduate School of Business’s first women professors, Stanford was simultaneously hiring pioneering women in law and engineering. The university arranged a press conference to display these new appointments. Strober asked Stanford Law School’s first woman professor, Barbara Babcock, what they should wear. Babcock replied, “Myra, we are the dress code.”
Male professors inherited a costume that could be accepted, rejected, mocked, or neglected. The first woman in a department was helping invent what a woman professor looked like. Dressing like the men could establish seriousness while also emphasizing that authority remained coded male. Rejecting professional clothes could identify her with the new academic culture while exposing her to a judgment the radical man could more easily survive. Stanford’s history recalls that when Strober arrived at the business school in 1972, she could barely find a women’s restroom.
In January 1995, Black law professor John Calmore appeared on an Association of American Law Schools panel immediately after Duncan Kennedy. Kennedy was wearing tattered dark jeans, a faded flannel shirt, and a battered leather jacket. Calmore was beautifully dressed in a suit with a silk tie. Calmore joked that he hoped someday to be able to dress like Kennedy. He then explained the joke. As a Black man traveling through airports, hotels, and cities, he felt he had to dress up to reduce the hassles attached to being read first as a Black man and only later, if at all, as a professor. Even then he had trouble getting taxis. Robert Chang and Adrienne Davis preserved the episode in their Harvard Journal of Law & Gender article “Making Up Is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom.”
A 1994 New Yorker profile described Cornel West in his habitual navy three-piece suit, white shirt, tie, watch chain, and cufflinks. West explicitly connected the costume to W. E. B. Du Bois, whose Victorian three-piece suit he saw as dignifying the intellectual vocation, and to the Black preaching tradition’s ideals of “excellence, elegance, and dignity.”
A secure academic can sometimes move downward from the norm, like Kennedy in jeans, upward from it, like West in a three-piece suit, or sideways from it, like the fashion-conscious academics of the 1990s. What status buys is the right to deviate without having the deviation automatically interpreted as evidence of incompetence.
The 1990s made this visible because academia developed both a strong anti-fashion norm and a small fashion avant-garde. In 1991 NYU cultural-studies professor Andrew Ross appeared at the MLA convention in a Comme des Garçons jacket, a Japanese hand-painted tie, earrings, and wedge-heeled suede shoes. Ross said the designer jacket was a send-up of the academic male convention of yellow polyester. By 1997 Princeton literary critic Elaine Showalter could publish an essay in Vogue titled “The Professor Wore Prada,” asking whether a feminist intellectual was allowed to enjoy fashion at all.
A superb 1998 Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Frumpy or Chic? Tweed or Kente? Sometimes Clothes Make the Professor,” caught academics explaining these codes while they were still alive.Wayne Koestenbaum talked about the “semiotic codes” of dress, hair, and makeup and connected his own appearance with changes in his intellectual allegiances. Physicists described pride in dressing down. Emily Toth said academic frumpiness could demonstrate devotion to the life of the mind. Nancy K. Miller observed the brutal asymmetry between candidates and incumbents. Scholars hunting for jobs were expected to look much better than scholars who already had one. The article opens with a hiring committee spending ten minutes discussing a candidate’s green polyester pants.
While the tenured professor could make not caring about clothes into a sign of seriousness, the candidate could lose a job because his trousers sent the wrong message.
Experimental psychology eventually caught up with what the professors were doing. Silvia Bellezza, Francesca Gino, and Anat Keinan’s 2014 Journal of Consumer Research paper “The Red Sneakers Effect: Inferring Status and Competence from Signals of Nonconformity” showed that deliberate violations of dress norms can increase perceived status and competence. The mechanism was perceived autonomy. Someone who visibly knows the rule and chooses to break it can look more powerful because observers infer that he can afford the social cost.
Nonconformity works when observers recognize the norm and interpret the violation as intentional. If they think the person simply does not know how to dress, the signal changes. The famous professor in sneakers can look autonomous. The nervous job candidate who arrives at the wrong interview in sneakers can look clueless.
Bellezza, Gino, and Keinan began from the observation that accomplished professors at professional meetings often dressed less conventionally than students and junior scholars. Their academic evidence found an association between research accomplishment and informal dress. Success provides independent evidence of competence. Once the CV speaks loudly enough, the tie can stop speaking.
Damon Phillips and Ezra Zuckerman’s 2001 American Journal of Sociology article “Middle-Status Conformity” argues that conformity can follow an inverted U. The people at the top have enough security to violate norms. People at the bottom may have little membership to protect. People in the middle often conform most because they have achieved enough status to value their position but not enough to treat it casually.
Applied to a university, that predicts that the most conventionally dressed person may be the assistant professor on the tenure clock, the visiting professor hoping to stay, or the candidate giving the job talk.
The Duke experiment complicates that prediction. Its 2000 Chanticleer lower-title faculty were more casual than the higher-title group. In 1975 the rank cases also scatter. Victor Strandberg, an associate professor with tenure, appears in jacket and tie with longer hair. Arif Dirlik, then an assistant professor, appears formally dressed. Janis Antonovics appears in a T-shirt. Academic rank alone fails to order them.
Matteo Prato, Emmanuel Kypraios, Gokhan Ertug, and Yonghoon Lee’s Academy of Management Journal paper “Middle-Status Conformity Revisited: The Interplay between Achieved and Ascribed Status” distinguishes status one earns inside a field from status attached to social categories before individual achievement is considered.
An academic may possess tenure, publications, reputation, and institutional rank while still receiving weaker presumptions of authority from strangers.
Mara Aruguete, Joshua Slater, and Sekela Mwaikinda randomly showed students otherwise equivalent Black and white professors in formal or casual clothing. Their 2017 Journal of Negro Education paper, “The Effects of Professors’ Race and Clothing Style on Student Evaluations,” found that students trusted the Black professor more when he was formally dressed. For the white professor the effect reversed. Casual clothing increased trust.
The same clothes were doing opposite work because they landed on different bodies. If observers grant unequal presumptions of authority, conventional dress can operate as compensatory evidence. Informality becomes cheaper for the person whose competence is already presumed.
Beverly Yuen Thompson found the same structure in interviews. Her Fashion Theory article “Academ-Ink: University Faculty Fashion and Its Discontents” describes a university stretching from power-suit administrators to professors in activist T-shirts. Faculty generally enjoyed considerable latitude, but straight white male professors received the greatest latitude. Academics with more marginalized identities reported greater pressure to conform to conservative expectations of professional dress.
A member of a group whose authority is readily presumed can use casualness to buy warmth, authenticity, eccentricity, or anti-corporate distinction. Someone whose competence is already being tested may need the clothes to continue supplying evidence.
Sebastian Oliver and colleagues conducted three experiments involving 1,361 participants. Their Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education paper “Fitted: The Impact of Academics’ Attire on Students’ Evaluations and Intentions” found that formal academic dress increased perceptions of competence but reduced perceptions of warmth. Casual dress did the reverse. Other information about the professor’s success and the norms of the discipline could reduce the competence penalty attached to informality.
Formal clothing supplies authority when authority remains uncertain. Informal clothing can spend authority that has already been established.
The Duke evidence adds another proposition. Formal clothing also supplies institutional office. The 1970 administrator comparison is stronger than the rank comparison because it occurs inside a single yearbook. Nine of nine senior administrators with observable neckwear wear ties. Ten of ten wear jackets. Selected academics in the same volume have already broken away from the code.
The person representing Duke as president remains tied to formal professional dress. The person representing himself as zoologist, historian, engineer, or teacher has more room.
By the 2010 Chanticleer, even the category “Faculty Spotlights” has become unstable. Its four featured people include a James B. Duke Professor, an associate university archivist, a counseling-center administrator, and a center director with faculty affiliations. The questions concern family, restaurants, hobbies, exercise, student advice, and surprising personal facts.
The editorial category has migrated from faculty as institutional class toward interesting adults associated with university life.
That change recalls Richard Sennett’s argument in The Fall of Public Man. Public roles depend on conventions that let strangers recognize a social position before knowing the individual occupying it. Clothing can provide one of those conventions. As personality becomes more culturally important, attention moves from office toward person.
Duke’s yearbooks perform that movement visually. In 1965 the category is department chairman. In 1970 it is selected academic adult. In 1975 it becomes teacher, scholar, personality, environment, and activity. In 1990 professors speak as intellectual selves. In 2000 they are stylized. In 2010 the boundary between professor and interesting university adult becomes porous.
Corporate America was becoming more casual too. In 1992 Dockers mailed its “Guide to Casual Business Wear” to roughly 25,000 human-resources managers. Levi Strauss cites surveys showing that the proportion of companies allowing some casual dress rose from about two-thirds in 1992 to nine in ten by 1995. Khakis and open collars ceased to distinguish the professor from the managerial world as effectively as they once had.
Professors, scientists, engineers, architects, and artists had been cultivating forms of occupational informality long before the tech billionaire in a T-shirt became a cliché. Silicon Valley detached casual dress from low income. By the 2000s a fleece, sneaker, open collar, or quarter-zip could belong to someone richer than everyone in the room. Informality could mean that the wearer was so secure that conventional displays of money and authority had become unnecessary.
That destroyed another old academic distinction. The 1950s professor could reject the businessman partly by dressing like a learned man of modest income. The contemporary millionaire technologist could wear clothes that looked more casual and less expensive than the professor’s.
Price and formality separated. Price and visible status separated too. Cashmere, minimalist shoes, unbranded knitwear, technical outerwear, and expensive garments designed to hide expense allow affluence to coexist with anti-display.
Academic anti-fashion therefore became harder to interpret. Frumpiness could signal devotion to scholarship. A designer jacket could signal cultural capital. A three-piece suit could signal conservatism, Black dignity, preaching tradition, aesthetic preference, irony, or eccentricity. Jeans could signal solidarity with students, disciplinary custom, indifference, youth, tenure, comfort, politics, or nothing at all.
In Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu says taste derives meaning from social differences and from mastery of distinctions that appear natural to those who possess the relevant cultural capital. In Homo Academicus, the university itself becomes a field of competing forms of capital. Put the two together and studied neglect becomes legible. Dressing as though one has forgotten the rules can be a display available most safely to someone whose position proves that he knows them.
Development officers, senior managers, outside counsel, recruiters, and consultants inhabit roles in which organizational authority often benefits from remaining externally legible. Faculty possess a different bundle of capital in publications, tenure, disciplinary reputation, grants, prizes, citations, and institutional affiliation. The administrator often benefits from looking like the office. The professor can sometimes benefit from showing that he is not the office.
Tom Wolfe understood the code before social psychologists gave it variables. He observed that intellectuals who look as though they do not care about clothes are often using clothes as carefully as bankers or soldiers do. They are communicating a different status allegiance.
In I Am Charlotte Simmons, the faculty at fictional Dupont University choose deliberately cheap-looking shirts worn open at the throat with uncreased jeans, khakis, or corduroys. The clothes distinguish them from the middle class. Academic anti-fashion functions as fashion because members of the status group learn its meaning.
In his 2006 Jefferson Lecture interview, Wolfe remarked on how rarely writers allowed themselves to be photographed in neckties. The open collar had become a bohemian sign of contempt for convention. Then, as Wolfe put it, “Then it becomes a convention itself.”
He placed the phenomenon in the history of bohemian status competition. Bourgeois artists and intellectuals adopted unconventional clothes, poverty, manners, and sexual styles partly to prevent themselves from being mistaken for the bourgeoisie from which many had come. They were defining themselves against a neighboring status group.
Wolfe noticed the inversion under Communism. Writers in the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union dressed like businessmen. His explanation was simple: “They were on top.” Once the intellectual becomes part of the establishment, businesslike formality can lose its old stigma.
That observation gives us a hypothesis extending beyond Duke. Professorial informality should be strongest when academics understand themselves as culturally prestigious outsiders confronting a commercial, bureaucratic, or political establishment. Where intellectuals understand themselves as the establishment, the meaning of formal clothes can change.
Wolfe’s own white suits performed the reversal. In a literary milieu where casual bohemianism communicated authenticity, he dressed like an exaggerated Southern banker. He called his taste counter-bohemian. The rebel could rebel against rebellion.
His larger claim was that clothing opens a route into status. Brands, shoes, furniture, manners, treatment of superiors and inferiors, and sartorial detail reveal what people expect their place in the world to be. In The Bonfire of the Vanities, he wrote, “You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.”
Clothes contain a miniature institutional history.
The Duke study remains one university and one publication. It cannot tell us how American professors as a population dressed in 1965, 1975, or 1990. The changing yearbook formats prevent false precision. Its value lies in making several mechanisms visible enough to test elsewhere.
Berkeley has placed online an extraordinary sequence of portraits of Sather Professors in Classics running from 1913 through the 1990s. Because institution, field, prestige, and photographic purpose remain relatively stable, the series comes close to a natural visual experiment. The early portraits belong unmistakably to the jacket-and-tie world. Later incumbents become progressively more varied. The University of Chicago’s photographic archive is even more useful because images are dated and often classified as formal or informal. In September 1980, for example, political-science chairman Leonard Binder was photographed informally in his office, tieless and open-collared. The photograph does not prove the theory. It shows how easily the theory could be tested.
Harvard holds the material needed for a larger study: faculty portraits from 1909 to 1972, News Office photographs from the 1970s, and Graduate School of Design faculty photographs from 1970 to 1990. Berkeley, Chicago, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and Yale have overlapping institutional photographic collections.
Take five departments at seven universities. Sample faculty photographs every five years from 1960 onward. Code tie, jacket, matching suit, denim, open collar, knitwear, T-shirt, athletic shoe, beard, tattoo, unusual hair, and identifiable brand where the image genuinely permits it. Record field, rank, administrative office, year, gender, and race from reliable biographical records rather than visual guessing. Most importantly, code photographic setting. A formal publicity portrait, classroom photograph, office candid, commencement photograph, conference appearance, and press conference are not interchangeable. Otherwise the project risks measuring the casualization of university photography instead of the casualization of professors.
Code deans, provosts, presidents, development officers, and senior administrators separately. The Duke experiment now gives a strong reason for doing so. Its best within-year finding is the persistence of formal dress among officeholders while faculty representation diversifies.
The outcome should also move beyond a single casual-to-formal score. Duncan Kennedy in battered jeans and Cornel West in a three-piece suit occupy opposite ends of that scale while sharing a capacity to depart from the local median and remain authoritative.
Measure conventional formality and distance from the expected costume of people in the same institution, field, role, sex, and period. Then ask whether high achievement predicts variance, whether institutional office predicts conventional formality, whether insecure positions predict conformity, and whether the cost of deviation changes by race and gender.
Dearing’s field differences should remain in the model. A physicist, business professor, literary scholar, law professor, engineer, and architect occupy different occupational ecosystems. The relevant norm has always been local.
The Duke findings generate several falsifiable expectations. Conventional academic formality should fall after the 1960s. Ties may decline before jackets. Institutional officeholders should remain closer to contemporary business-professional dress than ordinary faculty. The relationship between academic rank and informality should be weak or nonlinear. Representation should become increasingly environmental, personal, and individualized. Race and gender should modify the credibility cost of deviation. Field should matter substantially.
The direction of elite nonconformity may reverse again. When everyone wears ties, status can be expressed by removing one. When everyone wears hoodies, quarter-zips, sneakers, and open collars, putting the tie back on can become the deviation.
COVID pushed the underlying mechanism to absurd clarity. In 2020 Duke president Vincent Price filmed himself at home wearing a sport coat and shirt, then stood up to reveal khaki Bermuda shorts. “Zoom attire,” he called it.
The joke condenses sixty years of academic clothing. The camera sees the institutional role, so the jacket stays. The unseen lower half escapes the requirement. Context determines which pieces of clothing have work to do.
The professor’s clothes once helped establish the role before the professor spoke. Today the CV, title, institution, publications, reputation, disciplinary standing, web page, awards, and setting can do more of that labor. Clothing becomes freer as authority becomes legible through other channels.
Where those channels are weak or unequally recognized, clothing still works hard.
That is the connection between the Duke department heads, Peter Klopfer, Duncan Kennedy, John Calmore, Cornel West, the assistant professor on the job market, the president on Zoom, and the professor in a T-shirt. Each body arrives with a different amount and kind of authority already credited to it. Dress can supply authority, conserve it, spend it, reject its conventional form, or convert it into another status signal.
The 1950s professor distinguished himself from commerce by looking like a gentleman of modest means. The 1970s professor could distinguish himself from the establishment by looking closer to his students. The 1990s professor could turn frumpiness into intellectual seriousness or designer clothing into cultural capital. The modern professor can use expensive clothes that look inexpensive, formal clothes that look eccentric, or casual clothes that once would have made him indistinguishable from an undergraduate.
The clothes track who possesses authority before getting dressed.
Fifty years ago the jacket and tie could say, “I am the professor, not one of the students.” Today the hoodie can say, “I am the professor, not one of the administrators.” Only some people can make the hoodie say that. For others it may still say student, staff, unserious, young, outsider, or person who wandered into the wrong room.
The Duke yearbooks let us watch the old certainty dissolve. In 1965 the institution presents its academic chiefs through a nearly uniform costume. In 1970 professors begin separating the tie from the role while senior administrators retain it. In 1975 formal and countercultural elements mix freely. By 1990 casual professorial dress no longer asks to be interpreted. By 2000 formal and informal styles coexist as personality. By 2010 “faculty” itself has become an elastic category of university personalities.
The history is therefore larger than professors becoming casual. The common costume of academic authority lost its compulsory force at the same time that universities changed how they represented academic people. Office yielded ground to personality. A single visual code gave way to several legitimate ones.
Some professors kept the old costume. Some discarded parts of it. Some turned excessive formality into individuality. Some adopted anti-fashion. Some bought designer anti-fashion. Administrators stayed closer to professional-business dress. Women and minority professors often faced higher costs for informality. Famous and secure academics could sometimes violate expectations in either direction. Fields maintained their own codes.
The old costume disappeared unevenly because it had carried several kinds of information at once. Gentleman. Adult. Scholar. Professional. Department head. Member of an elite institution. Person entitled to speak. As those meanings separated, their clothes separated too.
The jacket survived the tie. The open collar survived its association with rebellion. The beard moved from deviance to banality. The T-shirt crossed from student life into faculty life. Formality survived as an option and sometimes became more distinctive because it was optional.
Academic freedom in clothing eventually made academic clothing difficult to identify.
American fiction noticed the professor’s clothes long before social scientists began treating dress as a measurable status signal. Novels preserve meanings that photographs cannot. A photograph can tell us that a professor wore a beard, tweed jacket, black suit, or T-shirt. Fiction can tell us what another professor thought the beard meant, why a young academic worried about looking wrong, why a shabby coat could become a moral statement, and how a three-piece suit might cease to mean conformity once almost everybody else had abandoned one.
The literary record also complicates the familiar story in which American professors dressed formally until the 1960s and then discovered casualness. Academic anti-fashion is older. Shabby gentility, tweed eccentricity, cultivated indifference to commercial polish, and the idea that excessive concern with clothes betrayed an insufficiently intellectual mind were already available professorial styles. What happened after the 1960s was an enlargement of the repertoire. Deviations that had once existed inside a highly legible formal system moved toward the center of academic representation. Eventually the system became so permissive that there was no longer one costume from which everyone was deviating.
The Professor’s House, published by Willa Cather in 1925, gives an early version of the distinction between the public professor and the scholar at work. Godfrey St. Peter’s intellectual life is centered in an inconvenient old sewing room. There he can work in clothing chosen for warmth and bodily convenience rather than institutional presentation. Cather even allows us to encounter “the Professor in pyjamas.” The professor as private scholar barely needs a costume. The public university role creates the stronger demand for one.
Professors have always had bodies offstage. The historical question is which parts of that private informality become permissible onstage.
Stoner, published by John Williams in 1965 but set across the first half of the twentieth century, makes academic clothing part of class mobility. William Stoner arrives from a poor Missouri farm and enters a social world for which he has little preparation. He wears the same black broadcloth suit, white shirt, and string tie in every season. Williams describes the clothes as fitting him like a uniform that had belonged to someone else.
That metaphor carries most of the sociology. Stoner has acquired the costume before he has fully acquired the identity. The suit gives him provisional membership in educated life. It is austere rather than luxurious. It distinguishes the scholar from his farming origins without making him look commercial or rich. He is learning how to become a professor partly by inhabiting a form that existed before him.
The old academic suit could facilitate accession. Clothing allowed someone without inherited cultural fluency to enter an institution whose codes he was still learning.
Pnin, published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1957, presents a different imperfect fit. Timofey Pnin wears tweed, flannels, conservative shoes, strange socks, and memorable ties. He is formal and eccentric at once. His clothes carry European manners into an American college environment that he understands imperfectly.
Pnin shows how much variation was already possible inside the jacket-and-tie regime. Formality did not eliminate eccentricity. Indeed, the old code gave eccentricity something against which to register. A ridiculous tie could be ridiculous because everybody understood the ordinary tie. Mismatched details were legible because the general costume remained stable.
Pnin is formally dressed while simultaneously violating taste. The clothes express nationality, generation, displacement, class, professorial identity, and individual oddity. He belongs to the code and fails at it in ways that make him more recognizably himself.
The Groves of Academe, published by Mary McCarthy in 1952, reveals that academic shabbiness could itself communicate moral distinction. Henry Mulcahy’s ill-fitting, impoverished appearance marks his distance from prosperity, worldly advancement, polished administration, and bourgeois success. McCarthy turns neglect into a social manifesto.
This academic type existed well before jeans and student radicalism transformed the campus. The professor who looked indifferent to material presentation could imply that his commitments lay elsewhere. Commercial failure could be translated into intellectual seriousness. Poverty, or the appearance of poverty, could become a status resource inside a culture that distrusted overt commercial ambition.
The professor’s shabby trousers and the banker’s perfect suit belonged to rival moral economies.
Pictures from an Institution, Randall Jarrell’s 1954 academic novel, finds a female counterpart. Jarrell’s professors inhabit a small college where clothing, speech, manner, intellectual allegiance, and social rivalry become readable with extraordinary precision. Female academic dress can already include an anti-glamour repertoire of tweed, sweaters, practical clothes, and deliberate distance from conventional feminine display.
Women entering academic life confronted several incompatible expectations. Academic seriousness could require distance from fashion. Femininity could require attention to it. Professional authority might reward resemblance to male colleagues while penalizing a woman who seemed insufficiently feminine. Fiction recognized the unstable category of “woman intellectual” before universities had settled on any visual convention for it.
The most revealing pre-1960s boundary test may come from A New Life by Bernard Malamud. The novel was published in 1961, but its academic world begins in 1950. S. Levin arrives for a junior teaching position with a beard. A colleague quickly tells him that students may think he is an oddball. Nobody on the faculty wears one. The administration is clean-shaven. Students grow beards. The president’s wife supposedly associates facial hair with radicals.
The scene is almost a miniature theory of academic fashion. It contains rank, institutional conformity, faculty-student differentiation, political coding, grooming, local norms, and reputational risk.
Levin is also new.
That detail is fundamental. The question is not merely whether a beard is permitted. It is whether this person, at this career stage, in this institution, can afford one. A famous senior professor might be eccentric. A new instructor risks looking as though he does not understand where he is.
Malamud therefore anticipated a distinction that later status research would formalize. Deviation has a cost. The cost falls hardest on people whose membership remains uncertain.
The novel also gives useful context to the Duke evidence. In Duke’s 1965 yearbook, beards are absent from the complete Department Heads sample. By 1975 they have become visible among faculty. Malamud’s fictional 1950 institution makes the earlier prohibition intelligible. A beard could collapse distinctions that the university still wanted clothes and grooming to maintain.
Yet McCarthy’s shabby professor reminds us that not every kind of informality was equally threatening. A professor could already look materially unsuccessful while remaining recognizably academic. Facial hair, student resemblance, bourgeois polish, eccentric ties, and shabby clothes occupied different positions in the code.
The 1960s changed academia’s anti-fashion vocabulary and broadened its political meaning. Older academic anti-fashion could say: I care more about ideas than money. The newer repertoire could add: I am closer to students than administrators. I identify with bohemia rather than business. I reject the establishment. I belong to a discipline in which corporate polish would look suspicious. I possess enough academic standing that I no longer need conventional professional clothes to establish seriousness.
That enlarged vocabulary becomes visible in White Noise, Don DeLillo’s 1985 academic novel. DeLillo gives the College-on-the-Hill several sartorial systems at once. Jack Gladney, chairman of Hitler Studies, has deliberately constructed himself. His name, physical bulk, dark glasses, academic role, and clothing contribute to an authored persona. Department heads wear black academic tunics around campus. The robe makes even an ordinary movement theatrical. Institutional office has become literal costume. Across the university, another academic tribe looks completely different. The American Environments faculty wear rumpled clothes, need haircuts, cultivate facial hair, and resemble an occupational subculture with its own anti-professional signals.
DeLillo’s achievement is to show both costumes as costumes. The formally robed chairman and the rumpled cultural-studies professor appear different, yet both participate in systems of academic signification. One exaggerates institutional office. The other performs distance from it. The second style only looks natural because its participants have learned to experience their own conventions as nonconventions.
Thisresembles the empirical result at Duke. In 1970, senior administrators remain overwhelmingly jacketed and tied while selected academic adults have already diversified. Formality adheres more strongly to represented institutional office than to academic identity in general. DeLillo turns that structural difference into satire.
Stoner inhabits a uniform. Pnin mismanages one. Levin negotiates permission to violate one. Gladney designs one.
By the 1980s the professor can increasingly become his own visual editor.
The Secret History, published by Donna Tartt in 1992 and set in the 1980s, reveals what happens when campus casualness has become ordinary enough that formality can become the rebellion.
The strongest clothes belong to Julian Morrow’s students. Henry Winter wears dark English suits and moves through a campus containing hippies, punks, preppies, and other contemporary styles while seeming to inhabit another era. Francis dresses with aristocratic theatricality. Richard Papen studies the group’s appearance because entry into Julian’s seminar means entry into an aesthetic jurisdiction. He changes his own clothes while trying to gain admission.
The reversal is complete. In Malamud, looking too much like a student threatens professorial identity. In Tartt, students can acquire distinction by dressing like an imagined older elite. Old clothes have become countercultural. That is exactly what should happen once a norm reverses. When almost everybody wears ties, removing one can signal independence. Once casualness becomes dominant, wearing a severe dark suit can accomplish the same thing.
Tartt also reminds us that professors can influence clothing without being the most conspicuously dressed people in the room. Julian’s power lies in defining taste. His students reorganize themselves around his conception of beauty, history, learning, exclusivity, and social difference.
The professor can generate a sartorial microculture.
This runs against a simple one-way history in which students innovate and faculty eventually follow. Cultural transmission can move in either direction. High-prestige academic enclaves can teach students how to distinguish themselves from other students.
Straight Man, Richard Russo’s 1997 academic comedy, supplies another correction to the idea that status steadily produces informality. Hank Devereaux encounters the visual memory of his younger self as a writer. The earlier author is shaggy and bearded. The older professor is balding and cleaner-cut.
The direction is the opposite of the easy theory.
Age and professional security have not released Devereaux into ever greater bohemianism. The young writer had stronger incentives to perform literary intensity and outsider identity. The established academic no longer needs that particular costume.
Different kinds of cultural capital reward different appearances. The aspiring novelist may benefit from looking like an artist. The department chair may benefit from looking like someone who can survive a budget meeting. The same person can move between those systems over a career.
The Duke repeated-person cases point in the same direction. Some professors remain formal across years. Some remain casual. George Pearsall changes from tie-wearing dean to open-collar professor. Individual careers do not follow one sartorial law.
Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon’s 1995 novel, gives us the mature version of the disordered creative-writing professor. Grady Tripp’s rumpled appearance belongs to a broader persona of writerly disorder, unfinished work, marijuana, damaged relationships, and institutional indulgence.
His appearance is interesting partly because nobody doubts that he is a professor.
The dishevelment has lost Malamud’s danger. It does not make Tripp look as though he wandered into the faculty by mistake. It helps identify the kind of professor he is.
That is an enormous historical change.
Once an institution contains stable subtypes such as the disheveled novelist, tweedy historian, laboratory scientist, fashion-conscious theorist, suited law professor, fleece-wearing engineer, and power-suited dean, academic dress has moved from a common costume toward a taxonomy of personalities.
Blue Angel, Francine Prose’s 2000 campus novel, pushes the collapse of the old professor-student visual distinction further. Its most conspicuous dresser is the student Angela Argo. Her dyed hair, piercings, leather, chains, and subcultural styling belong to a world in which the old debate about whether a professor may wear a beard feels almost quaint.
The professor no longer has to out-formalize the student to remain legible as faculty. Institutional context, age, title, classroom position, tenure, and social role do the classificatory work.
That is the world Duke reaches by 1990. The open-collar professor requires no explanation because clothing has ceased to bear the full burden of occupational identification.
On Beauty, published by Zadie Smith in 2005, may offer the richest fictional treatment of academic clothing after casualization because it places dress inside ideological, racial, aesthetic, and professional competition.
Monty Kipps, a conservative Black public intellectual, is a three-piece-suit academic. Howard Belsey, his white liberal antagonist, belongs to a different academic culture. Other scholars inhabit their own combinations of professional formality, racial presentation, generational identity, and disciplinary style.
The suit no longer possesses a single meaning. It can communicate conservatism. It can communicate dignity. It can connect a Black intellectual with traditions of clerical or public leadership. It can establish professional authority. It can mark ideological distance from a casually dressed liberal academy. It can also simply fit the occasion.
This is where the formal-casual axis finally becomes inadequate. Duncan Kennedy in battered jeans and Cornel West in a three-piece suit can be opposites in conventional formality while resembling one another in another respect. Each has enough authority to make a conspicuous departure from a local median intelligible as personal style rather than incompetence.
Fiction arrives at the same idea through characters. The important variable is sartorial discretion.
That discretion has several directions. A professor can deviate downward toward shabbiness. He can deviate toward bohemian casualness. She can deviate toward fashion. He can deviate upward toward archaic formality. Someone can deliberately dress more professionally than colleagues because professional dress communicates racial dignity or institutional seriousness. Another can dress less professionally because distance from administration or commerce improves his standing within his academic tribe.
The same deviation can also have different costs on different bodies. That problem sits near the center of The Human Stain by Philip Roth, although clothing is not Roth’s primary instrument. Coleman Silk spends a lifetime controlling how institutions classify him. Professor, dean, Jew, white man, Black man, outsider, insider, authority figure, sexual transgressor, and old man become categories attached to a body that other people repeatedly think they understand.
Roth’s subject is social legibility.
Clothing belongs to the same system as name, voice, skin, accent, manners, credentials, institutional office, and biography. Observers build identities from visible cues, often with enormous confidence and incomplete information. That is why academic fashion cannot be understood apart from race and sex. The freedom to become visually ambiguous depends on the amount of authority an observer grants before the clothes are interpreted.
A professor who is immediately presumed to belong can afford to look unlike a professor. Someone whose membership is doubtful may need the clothes to settle the question early. The fiction therefore suggests another variable beyond formality and sartorial discretion: legibility. Stoner’s suit makes him more legible as an educated man. Pnin’s clothes make him legible as professor while preserving his foreignness and eccentricity. Levin’s beard threatens legibility because it makes faculty and student categories overlap. McCarthy’s shabbiness remains legible because scholarly poverty is already an understood academic type. DeLillo’s robe exaggerates institutional legibility until it becomes comic. Tartt’s formal students deliberately make themselves illegible as ordinary contemporary undergraduates. Grady Tripp’s rumpled clothes identify a recognizable subtype rather than confusing anyone. Coleman Silk’s story reveals how deeply mistaken social legibility can be.
The history of faculty fashion can therefore be read as a history of how much visual ambiguity professors are allowed. In the older university, the professor’s clothes answered the question before he spoke. A suit, tie, haircut, age, posture, office, and institutional setting jointly established the category. Some eccentricity was permitted, but the general grammar remained stable. By the late twentieth century, other signals increasingly carried that information. A classroom, faculty directory, university web page, endowed title, publication record, disciplinary reputation, office door, conference badge, CV, or familiar name could establish authority independently of clothing.
That change creates room for ambiguity. The contemporary professor can sometimes enter looking like a software engineer, preacher, aristocrat, student, artist, consultant, mechanic, activist, novelist, or someone who forgot there was a meeting. Context resolves the classification afterward.
The old academic anti-fashion depended on a visible norm. Mary McCarthy’s shabby professor could make neglect meaningful because respectability remained easy to recognize. Malamud’s beard could shock because the administration remained clean-shaven. Pnin’s bad tie could be funny because a correct tie existed. The unconventional professor depended on convention for his unconventionality.
The post-1960s transformation weakens that background. As more styles become legitimate, deviation becomes harder to locate. A beard loses political force. An open collar loses bohemian force. Jeans lose their student monopoly. T-shirts become ordinary. Even deliberate frumpiness becomes an academic stereotype. Then the signaling game changes again.
Once casualness becomes expected, formality can carry the information previously carried by casualness. Tartt’s students can make suits look rebellious. Zadie Smith can make the three-piece academic ideologically distinctive. Cornel West can turn extreme formality into personal authorship. A young scholar today could conceivably use a tie to distinguish himself from a faculty full of quarter-zips and sneakers.
The direction of nonconformity reverses with the norm. This is why fiction gives access to the meanings surrounding the garments. Photographs tell us what changed. Novels tell us what the changes could mean to people living inside them.
The fictional chronology also helps reinterpret the Duke yearbooks. Duke’s 1965 department heads do not prove that every professor dressed formally. McCarthy and Malamud make that proposition implausible before we even look elsewhere in the yearbook. Duke itself confirms the point when Peter Klopfer appears casually in the Campus Personalities section. The 1965 finding is institutional. When the yearbook wanted to represent departmental authority, it used an extraordinarily narrow visual code. By 1970, the code begins breaking apart. Professors appear in classrooms, outdoors, in offices, and in activity photographs. Ties become optional while senior administrators remain formally dressed. By 1975, the old and new visual languages coexist inside the faculty sequence. Tie with long hair. Jacket with beard. T-shirt in greenhouse. Open collar in office. The individual combinations matter because they show that no replacement costume has taken command. By 1990, casual professorial dress hardly functions as a statement.
That trajectory fits the fiction. Malamud shows a beard threatening junior faculty membership. DeLillo shows departments possessing rival costumes. Tartt shows old formality becoming subcultural distinction. Russo shows that career progression need not mean increasing casualness. Chabon shows academic dishevelment becoming an established character type. Smith shows the suit returning with new racial and ideological meanings.
The novels therefore suggest a revision to the standard history. The professor did not move from fashion to anti-fashion. Academic life contained competing forms of fashion all along. Mid-century academia had a formal institutional code and several tolerated deviations within it. Shabbiness could mean intellectual seriousness. Tweed could mean scholarly vocation. A flamboyant tie could mean eccentricity. A beard could cross the line into dangerous student resemblance. The upheavals after the 1960s expanded the permissible zone. Political identification with students and hostility to commercial or bureaucratic authority gave casualness additional meanings. The occupational costume weakened. Academic subcultures became more visually autonomous. By the end of the century, the direction of deviation mattered less than the capacity to survive it.
Sartorial discretion is the ability to make the observer uncertain about what your clothes mean without making the observer uncertain about whether you belong. The junior professor in Malamud cannot safely do that. The established professor in DeLillo can. The rumpled novelist in Chabon can. The aristocratically dressed classicist in Tartt’s world can. The modern professor who already carries enough recognized authority may be able to let title, reputation, context, or performance resolve whatever ambiguity the clothes introduce. The older professor’s clothes told you who he was before he opened his mouth. The modern professor can sometimes make you wait.
