| What are you wearing? Whether it is jeans and sneakers or khakis with a sports coat, chances are college kids made it cool.;Collegians were both the inventors and test group for this change. This dissertation examines changes in student dress at Princeton, Radcliffe, Penn State, University of California at Berkeley. Morehouse, and Spelman during the first half of the twentieth century. It considers four venues (the classroom, the dormitory, the dance and the gym) to document how students created standards of dress that redefined the value of personal appearance in American society.;This dissertation studies the nexus between the history of business, the history of fashion, the history of consumerism, the history of higher education, the history of gender, the history of women, the history of sports, the history of race, the history of material culture, and the history of the middle class.;The modern wardrobe was born on the college campus in the first half of the twentieth century. Its purveyors were the knickers-clad members of Princeton's Cottage Club, the women of University of California's "Committee to Wear Pants to Dinner," and the saddle-shoed students of the Seven Sisters. What one fashion editor called in 1935, the "casual effect everyone is trying to achieve" has infiltrated practically every space from the office to the chapel to the classroom in almost every corner of the nation, if not the world. Today, clothing obscures, rather than accentuates, class and gender differences. |
