Safety (fashion) school?

A team from Women’s Wear Daily, fashion’s leading trade magazine, descended upon the Harvard campus last spring to research their second-annual assessment of Ivy-League style. Though WWD ranked Harvard a lowly fifth, they acknowledged that “it’s a rare situation in which a Harvard student isn’t at the head of the class.” The top ranking went to the artsier, left-of-center Brown.

Where did Harvard go wrong? According to WWD, a conservative college-wide uniform of “popped-collar polos, barn jackets and loafers for women and men” left Harvard in the dust. Depressingly, WWD chose a fictional Jenny Cavalleri in the soaked-with-sap Academy Award-winning Love Story as Harvard’s best fashion moment.

Ever committed to fashion perfection, FM revisited interviewees to try and understand what WWD wanted and how we can improve our threads for next spring’s ranking. We headed to two of WWD’s interviewees, Feilin A. Zhu ’06 and V. Elizabeth Encisco ’06, who had themselves been culled from oh-so-haute FM’s “Closet Case” article. The two are both science concentrators and only mildly interested in fashion. It seems WWD wasn’t interested in their style, which Encisco calls “nice and presentable.” Zhu says she recalled being asked if she had traveled to the fashion capitals, like New York and Milan, for shows. She concluded that “they were looking for more exotic and exciting” fashionistas to feature and photograph.

Zhu was not surprised by WWD’s findings: “Boston is a pretty conservative city; everyone is preppy together. Lacoste, pointy toe shoes, Longchamp bags—one person will have it; and then everyone will.”

Enisco says she suspects that WWD’s rankings were actually “looking to shape student fashion. They pretend to be listening to you but are really telling you how to dress—by ranking Brown first.” But ‘real life’ intervenes, as both Zhu and Encisco have found that environmental hazards need to be taken into wardrobe consideration, be it in the lab or out in the harsh Cambridge winter elements. One fashion truth that Zhu, Encisco, WWD, and FM can all agree upon: Cambridge’s puritanical cobblestones would be hell for any stiletto heeled Hester Prynne in search of another (scarlet) A.