Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American StyleAs Deirdre Clemente shows in this lively history of fashion on American college campuses, whether it's jeans and sneakers or khakis with a polo shirt, chances are college kids made it cool. The modern casual American wardrobe, Clemente argues, was born in the classrooms, dormitories, fraternity and sorority houses, and gyms of universities and colleges across the country. As young people gained increasing social and cultural clout during the early twentieth century, their tastes transformed mainstream fashion from collared and corseted to comfortable. From east coast to west and from the Ivy League to historically black colleges and universities, changing styles reflected new ways of defining the value of personal appearance, and, by extension, new possibilities for creating one's identity. The pace of change in fashion options, however, was hardly equal. Race, class, and gender shaped the adoption of casual style, and young women faced particular backlash both from older generations and from their male peers. Nevertheless, as coeds fought dress codes and stereotypes, they joined men in pushing new styles beyond the campus, into dance halls, theaters, homes, and workplaces. Thanks to these shifts, today's casual style provides a middle ground for people of all backgrounds, redefining the meaning of appearance in American culture. |
What people are saying - Write a review
We haven't found any reviews in the usual places.
Other editions - View all
Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style Deirdre Clemente No preview available - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
administrators Agnes Edwards American attire August became Bermuda shorts Boston Brooks Brothers cafeteria Cal’s California Campus Mirror casual clothing casual style Chalmers Alexander Letters college girls College Shops college women comfortable culture Daily Californian Daily Collegian Daily Princetonian Dartmouth dean decades dorm dormitory dress codes Edith Culver fashion editors Fashion Group International fashion industry February FGIR fibers Figure folder fraternity Freshman Froth garments Handbook Harvard Crimson Harvard Lampoon Ibid junior prom Knitted laundry look magazine male man’s manufacturers men’s middle-class Morehouse mother Nancy Murray October one’s oxford shoes pair pants and jeans Papers parents Penn State University Penn State’s Pennsylvania State University percent popular Princeton prom Radcliffe College Radcliffe’s retailers September shirts shoes skirts slacks sloppy joe social sorority Spelman College sports coat sportswear Stanford student newspaper suit sweaters Tobé Report told trend tuxedos UAUCB wanted wardrobe wore worn wrote York
Bibliographic information
| Title | Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style Gender and American Culture |
| Author | Deirdre Clemente |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | UNC Press Books, 2014 |
| ISBN | 1469614081, 9781469614083 |
| Length | 208 pages |
| Subjects | › Social Science / Gender Studies Social Science / Popular Culture |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |