The place I am staying for my old Program's annual conference this week has a "Dress Code and Policies" tab on its website. It has been almost a year now since I've had to worried about whether I'm sufficiently well-dressed to be somewhere.*
*The south, among its many other virtues, accepts a significantly more laid back approach to appearance. If I were to show up to most any academic event in a suit, the odds are good that I'd be the only one. I am aware that there are restaurants in Princeton where they'd look askance if I wasn't wearing a tie; the nicest restaurants in Durham (probably nicer than those in Princeton, FWIW) would look askance at you if you were.
6 comments:
I think the heat and humidity may have something to do with the South's relaxed dress code. We get tired of reviving Yankees who faint.
This is actually one issue that has yet to come up for me in these parts. I'm not aware of any restaurants where people need to wear suits (or how would the scientists have speaker dinners?) At the annual formal party here, I think the entire math department arrived in jeans, and no one, to my knowledge, made them feel bad about it. Of course, it could be that there's some kind of 'Einstein exception,' and people in certain fields (and their partners, happily) are almost expected not to dress up.
Meanwhile, I imagined everyone to be dressed up in the South, in seersucker, or who knows.
It's less a Princeton thing (though the average person there is still probably more formally dressed) than a Program-I-was-in thing. A group of us was waiting for a speaker last year who (not unreasonably) compared us to a group of pallbearers. The 30 Rock line about how no one is bitchier about hairstyles than conservative men is 100% true, and extends to everything sartorial.
I presume that the program-you-were-in was named for a President?
How'd you guess, Jacob?
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