As winter melts into spring, students are caught in a limbo when it comes to what to wear around campus. These are the kinds of days when short sleeves are of no use against morning wind as you walk to your 9 a.m.. However, when you make your way to AJ’s after the last class of the day, the weather seems to demand an iced drink and running shorts.
No one outfit works for the entire day, so students are forced to mix-and-match their seasonal clothes to achieve day-long comfort. Look around any classroom and you will see proof of this phenomenon in action.
The football player to your right is wearing sweats, a same sweatshirt , and—inexplicably —slides without socks. The Neidfelt kid to your left is wearing a Catholic Society sweatshirt, jean shorts, and—for some reason —snow boots.
These outfits, void of cohesion and a taste for fashion, are the Hillsdale student’s attempt at wearing something that will make sense for the whole day. On the flip side, sitting in the front row of your class is the sorority girl wearing woolen tights, a pencil skirt, and some expensive looking sweater. She is the poster child for a winter-ready wardrobe, but is red faced and sweaty by the end of the hour.
This is the current state of fashion at Hillsdale.
But there must be some happy medium. Students shouldn’t have to choose between sacrificing their comfort for fashion or their fashion for comfort. The perfect outfit must exist for this time of transition on campus.
When posed with this question, junior and local fashion icon Grace Stokman emphasized the importance of layers; starting the day warm and ending cool is no problem when you have a tee-shirt, a sweatshirt, and a light jacket.
Freshman and midwest native Emma Purdy suggested grabbing a cardigan before class. She was then asked if she personally owned a cardigan.
“Of course not. What do I look like, a grad student?” Purdy said.
Senior Nick Oxaal offers another perspective on this fashion crisis. He sees no need to make an attempt at comfort as the weather changes. He wears whatever he wants and, if he needs to walk from one place to another, he can “tough it out for a few seconds.”
Taking the toughness of Nick and the cleverness of Grace into account, perhaps we can all find the happy medium.
If we all look deeply enough into our closets and deeply enough into our strength against the weather , perhaps we can all survive the “Hillsdale Fashion Crisis of Spring Semester.”