I don't want to dress like my students
And other meditations on getting older as a professor-slash-style enthusiast
Welcome to the Esther Studio newsletter! I’m Carly, PhD, a marketing professor and artist living in the Midwest. I like talking about personal style, and I spend a lot of time making jewelry. If this sounds fun to you, keep reading and consider subscribing so we can see more of each other!
I turn 36 on October 31. In honor of the occasion, I’ll be canceling my classes - declaring it a national holiday and telling my students to enjoy the day off. I’ll also be telling my students how old I am, and making sure they know I’m excited to celebrate.
When I was a student, the concept of turning 30, or being in my 30s, was unappealing and confusing to me. I didn’t have a lot of data points to support these feelings, but they were strong nonetheless. My main frame of reference was an old episode of Friends - “The One Where They All Turn Thirty” - in which all six characters experience varying levels and types of existential malaise as they hit this milestone age.
Now, as I coast into my late 30s, I can officially say that getting older has a branding problem. Like many women I know, I look back fondly on my younger years but I wouldn’t return to them for anything. My 30s have so far been exciting, fulfilling, and challenging in the best way. While my day-to-day life has its fair share of ups and downs, I often feel that my home and work lives are like the dessert I get to enjoy for all the stress and pressure of my 20s.
So, when I celebrate my birthday with my students—all in their early 20s—I want them to know they don’t need to fear the passing of time like I did. With each passing year, we are all becoming more fully ourselves, with many exciting people, experiences, and discoveries waiting around the corner. And having a grown-up paycheck doesn’t hurt either.
What’s behind dress-your-age thinking?
Despite my warm, fuzzy feelings about aging, the process remains intertwined with a lot of personal style baggage.
When I was growing up, I read a lot of magazines, including the copies of Chatelaine, a Canadian women’s magazine that would come in the mail for my mom. I read these magazines cover to cover, but I particularly enjoyed the style content. I remember how the glossy spreads of seasonal, trendy outfits would be divided up and suggested to readers based on their age: “If you’re in your 30s, dress like this. If you’re in your 40s, dress like this. If you’re in your 50s, dress like this.” And so on.
This kind of fashion advice wasn’t unique to Chatelaine, nor was it unique to the time period, but since I read it during my formative years, it really made a mark on me by sharing some perhaps unintended messages about aging and fashion. Let’s consider the assumptions underpinning dress-your-age thinking:
There are standards of appropriateness that change as women get older. These standards of appropriateness revolve around women’s perceived decline in attractiveness with age. While it’s acceptable to show off your legs in your 20s and 30s, for example, make sure to hide them in your 40s and beyond. Generally, the standards for older women read as safe, covered up, and neutral, which feeds into the invisibility many women feel as they age.
Women want to dress their age. Women’s magazines function in many ways as a how-to guide for life, assuming that readers will follow writers’ instructions.
Style becomes irrelevant after a certain age. A lot of these fashion spreads lump ages 60 and up into the same category, as if there’s an endpoint to sartorial evolution.
I’m far from the first to question dress-your-age thinking, and I won’t be the last. But as I get older and experience what it means to occupy a new, arbitrarily constructed age category (and its new standards of appropriateness), I can’t help but rebel in my own way.
When I first started to question dress-your-age thinking, I was envisioning the possibility of wanting to wear clothes for 25-year-olds in my senior years. It should be perfectly fine to wear a mini skirt to check my blood pressure at the pharmacy!
While absolutely true, that scenario feels a bit simplistic.
I don’t want to dress like my students
What is the relationship between age and fashion, then, from my vantage point as an almost-36-year-old who spends an inordinate amount of time in the classroom with 21-year-olds?
Fashion and advertising market heavily market to this age group, meaning that what’s popular right now is often a symbol of youth and therefore a symbol of what is good, or desirable. However, if I don’t want to go back in time to be in my early 20s, it follows that I don’t want to dress like I’m in my early 20s.
What I wear as an almost-36-year-old is the culmination of 3.6 decades of getting dressed - 3.6 decades of living. The choices I make in purchasing, pairing, and wearing garments are distinctly the choices of someone who has been alive a bit longer than an undergraduate. And that’s okay.
There’s the gauzy square scarf I bought with my friend Sabina when we were vintage shopping in Toronto’s Kensington Market in roughly 2008. It has a little mountain scene on it, and in my head I think of it as my Sound of Music scarf. When I wear it knotted around my neck, I have the inner knowledge that my outfit is the product of time. That, even if no one else has a clue, it symbolizes friendship and trips made for concerts and gossiping about things I no longer remember.
I don’t see my students wearing scarves in this way, or at all really, and it creates an interesting separation in my mind when I’m standing in front of the class. As a still-young-ish woman trying to command respect in a public place, my fashion choices are important. I know what it feels like to have people question my authority at work - to dismiss my well-researched slides as “opinion” or to not listen to me at all. Dressing like a person who has experienced the passing of time, in my own specific way, becomes a way of signifying (at least to me) that I’m in charge of the classroom. When we talk about fashion as armor, this is exactly what I think about.
So no, I don’t want to dress like my students - and for that matter, I don’t think they want to dress like me either.
Style inspiration across generations
Before it starts to sound like I’m reinforcing the same dress-your-age thinking I was just condeming, let me reveal to you an unexpected joy of teaching undergraduates.
Every semester, I reliably end up with a group of students who love fashion as much, if not more than, I do. Since I see them multiple times a week, class becomes a fashion show where we talk about our outfits, swapping enthusiastic compliments as well as shopping and styling tips. More in-depth conversations happen during my office hours, when I hear the stories behind the clothes. I learn about the same sort of concerts I attended when I was my students’ age, the same sort of romantic entanglements, the same career aspirations stifled by stress. I think about how my students are discovering their style at the same time they are discovering themselves, and I love this for them.
I often hear from my students when they’re shopping or putting together an outfit. “This looks like you!” they say. When this happens I feel so warm inside, because they’re always spot on, and I know they see me.
If I have any influence on my students’ style, they most certainly influence mine. Their devotion to comfort made me stock my closet with cool sneakers I can wear to class with my dress pants. Their passion for thrifting, propelled by creativity and small student budgets, made me rekindle my dormant secondhand shopping inclinations. Their commitment to self expression above trends gave me the confidence to dress as myself in the classroom. After all, if there is no singular way to dress your age, there is no singular way to dress like a professor.
As these students graduate, they become my cool younger friends, and I get to see them style outfits for their own jobs. In more than one case I have bestowed on them my own work-appropriate hand-me-downs, sending them off into the world with the armor they might need to feel as powerful as I know them to be. We continue to gush over each other’s outfits over Instagram or text, from many miles away.
These relationships have shown me that style doesn’t fit neatly into magazines’ age categories. More than that, the stories we tell with our clothes can never be considered separate or autonomous. Our style stories are forever connected, bucking any conventional dress-your-age thinking. For this reason, I don’t want to dress like my students, but I absolutely will dress with them.
This post is dedicated to Brynn and Julianna.