The Nature of College. James J. Farrell
we did think about it, we’d notice how complex it has become.
Like all Americans, college students value comfort, so they usually put on clothes that put them at ease. Mostly, this means cotton clothing—because cotton is soft and breathable, and because cotton trade groups have done a good job promoting their product as the “natural” choice. There’s also a style of college comfort that’s as important as the substance of comfort itself. A finely tailored three-piece suit can be perfectly comfortable, for example, but college students don’t generally dress that way. Pants with elastic waistbands are very comfortable, but most college students aren’t comforted by that look either. College students want the comfort that comes from familiar fashions like jeans and sweatshirts and T-shirts—clothes that signify comfort, but also informality and a laid-back lifestyle. They choose their individual look, but—in another act of indi-filiation—they tend to choose what everybody else chooses.1
Beyond comfort, Americans wear clothes that are functional, that regulate the air temperature near our skin. All clothes are a kind of habitat, designed to control airflow by trapping body heat in cooler weather or inviting the evaporation that cools us in warmer weather. Given such functionality, clothes could help colleges (and other fossil-fuel consumers) regulate carbon consumption by keeping indoor temperatures lower in the winter and warmer in the summer. Thermostats at sixty degrees in the winter and eighty degrees in the summer, for instance, would likely encourage a more weather-wise dress code. But Americans seem to have decided that indoor air temperatures should be standard no matter the season, and we keep temperatures at a level where we can wear T-shirts year-round. We pay more attention to fashion seasons than the natural seasons.2
We’ve also been taught by advertisers that we need specific clothes for specific occasions. These days, you need sportswear for sports, activewear for activity, and clubbing clothes for dancing. This means that most of the time most of our clothes aren’t being worn, they’re being closeted. In fact, many of the clothes in a college student’s closet are “just-in-case” clothes, hanging around just in case they get an invitation to the ball. And some of these contingency clothes are never used—except as an insurance policy for remote possibilities. So most college students, like most Americans, use some clothes by not using them.3
Beyond comfort and functionality, we like clean clothes. Like our body-cleansing rituals, our clothing choices are a part of the American cult of cleanliness, hammered into our heads by parents and detergent companies. We’re not thinking about detergent ads when we get dressed, but as we look for a clean shirt in the closet, we’re conforming to their model.
This expectation of cleanliness also drives a desire for quantities of clothes. While his parents may send stuff out to the dry cleaners, Joe College is on his own—and he doesn’t want to waste money or time on cleaning. So one reason for the considerable quantities of collegiate clothes is laundry: The more students have, the longer they can avoid the trip to the laundry room or Laundromat.
College clothes can look worn, but most students don’t dress in clothes that are tattered and torn. Though some people will pay for clothes that come from the manufacturer “distressed” and defaced, few wear clothes that have actually been repaired. In the past, most Americans mended torn clothes, but patches and darns have gone the way of tailors and seamstresses. In a system of low-cost labor and global outsourcing, it’s systematically cheaper to replace a garment than to repair it. Culturally speaking, the material we waste seems immaterial to us.4
When we dress in the morning, we generally want clothes that fit—and that make us look fit. We don’t wear clothing that is three sizes too large or too small. And because the body often changes in college, clothes are needed to accommodate those different possibilities. When students gain weight, for example, they sometimes hold on to their smaller sizes, keeping a closet of clothes for “after the diet.” In any case, most people choose clothes that flatten or flatter the body, so that it looks like the body we ought to have. When we’re feeling bad about having put on a few pounds, we want clothes that conceal our bulges. When Joe College is pleased with the muscle he’s amassed in the weight room, he wants something that shows it off. When Jo College hopes to attract the attention of that certain someone, she might dress differently than everyday. As this suggests, the physical fit of a garment is often psychological, too. We want clothes that fit the body, but we also want them to fit—or to alter—our different moods. Clothes can express both happiness and hopefulness, and they can provide therapy when we’re in the dumps. What we see in the mirror is important, but there’s always more to clothes than meets the eye.
Beyond the physical and psychological fits of clothing, there are social fitness rules, too: Like our other belongings, our clothes help us belong, so we’re interested not just in how our outfits fit but how they help us fit in. Even though we might deny it, we dress for display, and the opinions of our friends and social groups mean a lot to us, usually even more than advertising. Acting as mannequins for each other by wearing certain styles, we’re not just commercial images on the screen or pictures on the page; we’re trusted friends whose opinions matter. So routine comments and compliments like “cool hat” or “cute outfit” are very good at teaching us about the substance of superficiality—the ways in which surface things like cosmetics or clothes or brand names have real impacts on our social lives. Our concern for appearances, therefore, is often a concern for “appeerances,” and our desire for such social status affects both the status quo and the state of the world.
Appeerances: The way that peer pressure looks in our lives.
Though some of our clothes help us identify with the very real communities we dwell in, they also involve us in more abstract imaginative communities, the ones that are sold to us in advertising and marketing. College is a logo-centric world, so many students buy clothes for the logo as well as for the garment. Abercrombie shirts, Gap jeans, and Nike shoes express membership in a “consumption community ”—a community characterized by common taste and values. Targeted branding strategies allow advertisers to segment the market—one kind of Converse for skateboarders, another for basketball players—but they let all of us feel like we belong to something special. Almost half of college students say that “the brands I buy say a lot about me.”5
One of those brands is the college itself, identifying the wearer with the aspirations and values of her school. At Division I schools, a lot of the logowear expresses affiliation not with the institution’s academic culture, but with its sports teams—and with the natural symbols of the institution. Collegians wear team shirts emblazoned with lions, tigers, bears, badgers, gophers, wildcats, and wolverines. Take all the collegiate mascots together, and you’d have the makings of a pretty good zoo.6
In describing other societies, anthropologists would call these mascots totems—animals, plants, or objects that serve as emblems for a clan, tribe, or family. Some indigenous groups, for example, have identified with plants or animals, and ritualized their relationships to them to maintain harmony with the natural world. In our mass culture, on the other hand, a totem is an animal, plant, or object that serves as a commercial emblem for a college or university, especially its athletic teams. Such symbols carry no real sense of identification with nature, no sense of interdependence, no sense of cosmic relation, except in the cosmos of fun and commercialism. In college culture, mascots provide a symbol for sales—a brand logo that expresses fandom—but they don’t give us much knowledge of nature, or affection for the natural world.7
Some students dress up clothes with ideas and ideals, identifying sometimes (obliquely) with nature, too. Some students sport T-shirts festooned with images of nature, logos of environmental organizations, or beliefs about nature: “Humans aren’t the only species on earth. They just act like it”; “Renewable Energy—The Answer Is