I was hoofing it up to North Campus last Tuesday, late to some lecture that shouldn’t be up there anyway, hair flying around in absolutely unacceptable ways in the insane wind, minding my own business.
And damned if the single most attractive Kellogg student didn’t slam right into me outside Arthur Andersen Hall, and even more damned if he didn’t totally ignore me after the “oh, sorry.” Now, I don’t expect attractive older men to give me second looks, but seeing how he nearly trampled me, I feel like I at least merited a “what-a-freak” glance.
Then I took a look at myself: dirty jeans, pink sneakers, tote bag, green T-shirt with nerdy phrase on it, white cotton zippy sweatshirt, bright red glasses and the aforementioned disaster hair.
I was dressed like a 12-year-old. Maybe, I thought, settling into class, I should try to dress like a human being, if for no other reason than to pick up Kellogg men. Or, more importantly — and usefully — to feel less uncomfortable when the day comes when I can’t wear a hoodie.
I looked around the lecture room, though, and realized that many students were dressed similarly — not up, not down, just somewhere in between.
Northwestern students — not anywhere’s college students, not people between the ages of 18 and 22, just NU students — I am proud to say, have made up a style. We created our own clothing genre, where we can’t parade around like teeny-boppers (a little too old to be on the Abercrombie Water Polo Team, right?), but where we certainly needn’t go suit-and-tie-ing our way through Modern Materials and Society.
In short it’s hoodies-as-business-casual, because our “business” is class, and par for the course is the hoodie. And it’s fabulous.
My three Friday classes, for instance, have about 45 total people in them. Of those, only one person was wearing actual sweatpants, but veritable multitudes were in hoodies and T-shirts. In other words, we don’t get dressed up for class, but we do at least get dressed.
We are also a high-end-happy campus (the one girl in sweatpants was carrying a designer totebag), but in the strangest ways: Louis Vuitton bags thrown on the floors of classrooms as bookbags, Seven jeans at Dance Marathon, Burberry galoshes tromping through the melting snow. Average, middle America is where we are, but certainly not what we wear, and it suits us just fine.
Our style is a glorious, cozy midpoint somewhere between high school days of tentative fashion experimentation and real-world slacks and skirts, a wardrobe life phase where $170 jeans are acceptable to wear with a smelly hoodie all day and a cute top all night.
No one, Kellogg Man or otherwise, should expect me or anybody else to get all decked out on a windy day just to hike up north. We are undergrads, gosh darnit, and we are growing into our style like we grew into our big ears and noses. Dressing like grownups doesn’t come naturally to many of us — just give us a little more time.
Abby Wolbe is a Weinberg junior. She can be reached at [email protected].
