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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The radical professor did not need a Che Guevara shirt. Looking unlike the corporate lawyer could say which hierarchy he rejected. The conservative professor could express continuity with a professional world the radical colleague regarded as compromised.
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.”
The joke works because the problem was real. 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. Clothing was hardly the only institutional language telling her who had been expected to occupy the building.
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.”
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Cornel West shows why the theory cannot simply be “high status equals casual.” West went the other way on purpose. A 1994 New Yorker profile described him 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.”
The real privilege is sartorial discretion.
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 not the right to wear a hoodie. It 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.
Corporate America was meanwhile casualizing 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 did something different. It 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 ceased to mean modest means. It could mean that the wearer was so secure that conventional displays of money and authority had become unnecessary.
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 only when observers recognize the norm and believe the violation is intentional. If they think the person simply does not know how to dress, the status signal disappears. That distinction separates the famous professor in sneakers from the nervous job candidate who arrives at the wrong interview in sneakers.
The study even examined academics. 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. The causation cannot be established from that observation alone, but the mechanism is exactly the one the broader experiments identify. 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 not be the dean or the graduate student. It may be the assistant professor on the tenure clock, the visiting professor hoping to stay, or the candidate giving the job talk.
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.
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.
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.
Deviation has unequal costs. 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.
Modern experiments make the competence tradeoff explicit. 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.
COVID pushed the mechanism to absurdity. 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 waist-up professor was an accidental parody of the entire history. The visible half retained institutional authority. The invisible half abandoned it.
The 2020s may be producing another turn. Cashmere, unbranded knitwear, technical outerwear, minimalist shoes, and expensive clothes designed not to advertise expense fit the logic perfectly. A $500 sweater can reject the banker’s suit while costing as much as one. What has clearly changed is that price and formality have become increasingly separable. Academic anti-commercialism no longer requires looking poor.
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.
That is also why the most important contemporary visual boundary is professor versus administrator. Development officers, senior managers, outside counsel, recruiters, and consultants inhabit roles in which organizational authority must remain externally legible. Faculty possess a different kind 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.
This is visible in the archives, although nobody has yet assembled the longitudinal dataset that would settle it. 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. Then stop treating “casual” as the outcome. Measure conventional formality, but also measure distance from the prevailing costume of people in the same institution, field, rank, sex, and decade. Duncan Kennedy in battered jeans and Cornel West in a three-piece suit lie at opposite ends of a casual-to-formal scale but may occupy the same position on the variable that matters. Both are visibly refusing the local median.
Academic dress should become less conventionally formal after 1960. Within a given period, established academic status should increase the latitude to depart from occupational norms. The relationship may be nonlinear, with people in the insecure middle conforming most. The status benefit should interact with race and gender because equivalent rank does not necessarily produce equivalent presumptions of authority. Administrators should remain closer to contemporary professional-business dress than faculty. Field should matter strongly, as Dearing already demonstrated in 1969. And the direction of elite nonconformity itself may change. When everyone wears ties, status can be expressed by removing one. When everyone wears hoodies, status might someday be expressed by putting one back on.
The history is that the costume of academic authority changed as the university’s relationship to other elites changed. 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 evidence of intellectual seriousness or designer clothing into a performance of cultural capital. The modern secure professor can often make indifference itself conspicuous.
The clothes track who possesses authority before getting dressed.
Fifty years ago the jacket and tie said, “I am the professor, not one of the students.” Today the hoodie can say, “I am the professor, not one of the administrators.” But only some people can make the hoodie say that. For others it may still say student, staff, unserious, young, outsider, or person who has wandered into the wrong room.
Tom Wolfe 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 just communicating a different kind of status.
In I Am Charlotte Simmons, the faculty at the fictional Dupont University chose deliberately cheap-looking shirts worn open at the throat, combined with uncreased jeans, khakis, or corduroys. The point was “to distinguish themselves from the mob, which is to say, the middle class.”
The professor dresses casually because he is participating in a particular status system. The cheap shirt can perform the same function inside the university that an expensive suit performs at an investment bank. It says: I belong here. I know the code. I am not one of them.
In his 2006 Jefferson Lecture interview, Wolfe said that men who insist they are indifferent to fashion are trying to fit into whatever milieu they inhabit. Writers provided his favorite example. He noticed how rarely authors allowed themselves to be photographed wearing neckties. The open collar had become a bohemian badge, supposedly signaling contempt for convention. But, Wolfe observed, “Then it becomes a convention itself.”
He placed this in a much older history of intellectual status competition. Wolfe described bohemianism as originating among bourgeois artists and intellectuals who adopted unconventional dress, poverty, sexual behavior, and manners precisely because they wanted to distinguish themselves from the bourgeoisie from which they had come. In his account, the bohemian was obsessed less with the aristocracy or proletariat than with avoiding resemblance to the middle class. Dress was one of the easiest ways to make that distinction visible.
Discussing Czechoslovakia under Communism, he pointed out that members of the Writers’ Union dressed like businessmen. Why? Because they were no longer marginal bohemians. “They were on top.” Their clothing reflected their actual place in the status hierarchy.
His hypothesis: Professorial informality should be greatest when academics understand themselves as culturally superior outsiders confronting a bourgeois establishment. Where intellectuals themselves constitute the establishment, formal dress may cease to carry the same stigma.
There is another wrinkle. Wolfe regarded clothing as a key status detail. In a TIME interview he said: “Clothing is a wonderful doorway that most easily leads you to the heart of an individual.” What interested him was what a person was trying to communicate about his position. In The Paris Review, he similarly explained that brands, clothes, furniture, manners, and treatment of inferiors and superiors reveal an individual’s expectations about his place in the world.
This also explains Wolfe’s ridiculous white suits. They were counter-bohemian. Within a literary world in which looking informal signified rebellion, Wolfe rebelled against the rebels by looking like an exaggerated Southern banker. He said that “a rebel in a free country is the rebel within the status group.”
In The Bonfire of the Vanities, Wolfe wrote: “You never realize how much of your background is sewn into the lining of your clothes.”
