University Dressing: The Specifics Of The Style

University has and always will be a very novel pocket of time and space that few of us get the privilege to live through. It’s an individual experience that you can’t compare to anything else – you can compare your A-Levels to an uphill battle, or a breakup to a painfully slow death, but you can’t really compare the uni experience to anything else. And the uniqueness of the experience comes with a uniqueness in style.

I’ve just completed my first year of university, and despite finishing ¼ of a Philosophy and Linguistics degree and meeting some of my best friends, I’ve spent most of the year deciding what to wear. From this, I’ve learnt that there is a very distinct style for university students, and a specific criterion by which your outfits are judged.

A lot of the uni dress code is, of course, dependent on the context where you find the students – if you see us in the club, we’re probably wearing the jeans-and-a-nice-top combo. In lectures, most of the time, we go for comfy casual: sweatpants, t-shirts, cute jeans (on a rare occasion), jumpers, etc. It does (naturally) vary from student to student, but this seems to be the average outfit – the thoughtless and classic formula for when you drag yourself out of bed for your 9 am, or get convinced to go out for the 4^th night in a row by your bad-influence friends.

Degree-dependent dressing 

As well as varying between students, the difference in what we wear seems to be swayed by our degrees. In my experience, both Philosophy and Linguistics students seem to dress annoyingly well, or at least well enough to make me question every style choice I have ever made each time I step foot into a lecture theatre. But it appears to be a stereotype that bears some truth that students dress according to their degree.

The best way of identifying this phenomenon is by comparing the outfits on the university’s STEM campus versus the humanities campus, as they tend to contrast. Since realising the prevalence of the theory, my friends and I developed a classification system to best understand it: as a uni student, you can either be a backpack or a tote-bag person. And it’s really that simple. A higher proportion of STEM than humanities students are backpack people, and a higher proportion of humanities than STEM students are tote-bag people. It’s important to realise that what kind of person you are isn’t completely dependent on what you use to transport your laptop; it’s more to do with your personality and general vibe. You can be a tote-bag person who regularly uses a backpack - there’s much more to it than just bags, but I’m yet to nail the science behind it (I’m a tote-bag wearing humanities student after all).

The College Bob 

Within this little bubble of style, we also get very particular trends that wouldn’t necessarily be trending elsewhere. One of the ways that the university lifestyle has manifested into fashion sense is through popular hairstyles and cuts. What I keep seeing around is the fittingly nicknamed “college bob”: a bob which is a little bit longer than a classic French bob, and has a sort of softness to it. It’s a refreshingly cool hairstyle which has all the benefits of short hair, whilst not having the upkeep - ideal for uni students (who feel massive remorse at the thought of cheating on our hometown hairdressers). I see this haircut more and more around campus, and as someone who has spent ages growing out her hair, it’s just a little too tempting.

Bobs are undeniably trending outside of the uni atmosphere, but this specific variation seems to be more popular amongst students (hence the name). It might be because we’re enduring a weird period of transition, so we have the unrelentless urge to cut our hair to suit this new era, but not the guts (or upkeep funds) to commit fully to a French bob. So, the college bob seems like the perfect compromise to express yourself within the college climate.

The College Connection 

Although I’m just one person who has attended one year at a single university, I feel as though I have gotten to know who people are through what they wear. When going from knowing everyone in your year group at school, not feeling like you recognise any of the faces on your course can make you feel quite isolated, and paying attention to other features of their person (like the bag they carry) can help you familiarise yourself with your cohort before learning their names. I may just be one university student, but I’ll be damned if I haven’t tried to learn how to use clothes to identify with my peers.

In one of the most transitional times that we’re going to live through, we find brief moments where we all seem to connect. We come from different backgrounds, we study different things, and we’re fundamentally different people, but we’re all here together, and we all need to dress ourselves each morning. Weirdly, this seems to translate into us all wearing the same things.