There are some days when I deliberately push back against Professional Academic Norms in what I'm wearing: days, usually, when I feel I'm wobbling on the edge of the job swallowing me whole.
Mind you - do such Norms even exist any more? I have male colleagues - well, one in particular - who wear shorts from one end of the year to the other, ready to take up a trowel and sieve and plunge into full archaeological excavation mode (not very convincing in South Central LA, but it's certainly a costume). On the other hand, some other colleagues hit what would be, for me, a level of unattainable elegance, daily. I try for respectability, at least - but it wasn't always so: once upon a time I was my department's sartorial rebel, and fondly cherish the memory - from sometime early in the 1980s - when a student asked me, incredulously, "are lecturers [remember, this was the UK, so that meant a TT faculty member] allowed to wear jeans?" Today, it was mood-lifting when grads passed me in the corridor and went "ooooh, SHOES." (and if you're wondering, they're made by a Spanish firm called UIN, and are ridiculously comfortable).
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