Collegiate Club Seeks to Bring Class Back to Campus

I meet the Collegiate Club in their collegiate meeting spot: Lamont Library’s Larsen Room. Reclining in their chairs, these freshmen greet me with faces bright with excitement. They want to convince Harvard that they are putting out a quality product with their online fashion blog. I want to tell them this is not Stanford— we don’t just make things happen around here; we first try to comp and seek entry to the Acropolis of exclusive organizations.

“I was seeing a lot of guys not dressing that well,” starts to explain Bardeya Moradi ‘18, one of the founders. “They wear suits that don’t fit properly.”

As a true entrepreneur, Moradi thought, “there must be something I could do.”

The Collegiate Club will cater looks for the students to aid them with crucial first impressions by offering snapshots of trendy looks on their Lookbook and the Yard Style page.

The group directs its criticism not only towards fashion-ignorant students, but also those who restrict themselves to embodying the Ivy prep. In a world where Vineyard Vines and boat shoes sometimes seem like the only wardrobe options, the Collegiate Club’s founders believe students lack the resources to express themselves.

The staff also publishes features on “The Hook Up” (a pun on hooking up students with ideas and hook up culture).

Silvano D’Agostino ’18, a co-founder, mentions that he will publish a piece on the beauty of silence. He nods to take in the sounds of admiration from the board. He wants to discuss “metaphoric and literal silence” in his essay. D’Agostino has the air of a seasoned professional. I examine his grey suit and double collared shirt. He explains the origins of the Collegiate Club, a name that they picked because “it just sound[ed] cool,” according to Moradi.

“Bardeya and I met at a panel discussion in October about e-commerce,” D’Agostino says. The other members later connected with the duo. It seems like having noticed Moradi’s style before the conception of the magazine is a common sentiment across the board. “That guy is really well dressed but I don’t know him,” reminisces Irene A. Nicolae ‘18, the editor-in-chief.

Moradi attributes his own striking sense of fashion to his origins in Kensington, a swanky district of South London. The other members on the board—Nicolae, Head of Photography Katie L. Borrazzo ’18, a Crimson multimedia executive, and Michelle L. Kim ’18 who does the social media/PR—contribute their distinct talents but share a mutual understanding of fashion.

I turn to Nicolae, who seems to particularly enjoy embodying a sense of fashion and vocalizing her passion. She stresses the need for education about fashion. “It’s the motifs,” she reflects, and points out that no one knows what the looks are “from the runway.”

“Who cares about fashion if they are running Goldman Sachs?” Moradi interjects, acknowledging that some students may not have time to invest in their choices of attire.

Even though they went online just this month, the group is already in the midst of scaling, but their first priority hasn’t changed: to put out good content. For their Valentine’s Day Special, “50 Shades of Crimson,” Moradi accepted a guide to masturbation from a student who reached out to him in Annenberg.

“We’re happy to push limits,” he says. Another feature of this nature is “How To Douche Your Way Through Valentine’s Day,” by Max F. Mondelli.

Whether Harvard students will deem the Collegiate Club worth their time, and pay attention to the content they create, only time (and the number of clicks on the website) will tell. In the interim, members of the board will keep creeping over people’s computers in Annenberg to see if they are reading the new issue of the Collegiate Club.