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So I’ve been to special collections, and I’m having a rough time turning up much about our purportedly 1913 Daisy Chain dress. There just don’t seem to be more than one or two photos of the 1913 Daisy Chain, and those photos are quite unclear. The good news is that I feel that the dress very well could be a Daisy dress, as it seems to fit the general look, even with the sash, which I believe is original. Many of the photos of the daisy chain through the 1910s show girls wearing sashes that appear to be darker than their white dresses (if only a little). The dramatic shattering of the silk sash also lends weight to its original pairing with the dress, even if the whole ensemble isn’t daisy chain.

I have one lead in an old copy of the Misc that I’m going to pursue, but other than that I’m kind of stumped.

In slightly more general news, it appears that there were no uniform dresses in the 1910s…I’m beginning to think the uniform might have come later, especially because it might have been easier to procure a standardized cut in a larger number of garments and a variety of sizes. More on that later.

For those of you still looking around for research, I’ve discovered that the old Vassarions have a lot of useful information. In addition to listing the members of the daisy chain (at least back in the teens) they also have close up photos of sports teams, clubs, and other groups. They have a complete collection of them in the reading room of special collections, and I dont think you need an appointment to look through them?

Hopefully this was helpful. If anyone has any ideas about where else I might look, I’d appreciate it!

Hi, everyone! My name is Ceci Cholst and I am researching a 1935 Class Day dress donated to the collection by Mrs. Sarah Sillcocks Graham.

Before I get into the dress itself, I want to talk about the class of ’35.

They seem like they were an especially exuberant class. The yearbook theme was “Children’s Books” in an effort to “record not only the actualities of Vassar…but want also to express…the spirit we have felt towards it.” (1935 Vassarion, forward.)  In a poem on their senior page, they proudly boast that they fought for the New Curriculum and the defeat of the Nuna Bill. They also discuss how they chose their Class Day dresses in the winter, anticipating a happy spring where, uncertain about the future but surrounded by loving parents, they would graduate.

According to The Great Experiment: A Chronicle of Vassar, a timeline issued during the college’s centennial celebrations, the New Curriculum abolished what remained of any sort of required courses–Hygiene–and required that freshmen only take four courses, instead of five. According to the 1935 yearbook, Vassar students had a range of subjects to choose from–from Bibliography and Botany to Zoology–so, presumably, the individual student could meet “the intellectual and social needs of young women students in the new world of today.” (Bulletin of Vassar College Vol. 25, No. 1 1934-35, 13.)

The 1935 girls were also active outside of the classroom: on February 19, 1935 80 Vassar girls reportedly went to Albany to protest two separate bills that required students and professors to swear an oath of allegiance to the United States. In addition, the yearbook itself amply attests to the involvement the class of ’35 had in student life: many girls were involved in dramatic productions and singing groups, which probably came in handy for the outdoor ceremony on Class Day.

From what I’ve been able to gather so far, Class Day traditionally consisted of an outdoor show where all of the seniors sang a song or somehow performed while wearing matching dresses. The Daisy Chain–a group of sophomores who wore their own matching white dresses–would come to decorate the set. There was a play. Class Day was usually two days before the actual graduation ceremony. My main questions right now are: Who planned the events? Were the Daisy Chain dresses and the Class Day dresses always so closely related? When did the tradition start of all of the girls wearing the same dress? And what did they do with those dresses after graduation?

In our discussions of the potential focus of the VCCC’s upcoming exhibition, we began to talk a little about dressing academically. Our broad focus for the exhibition, at least for now, is to explore the ways in which education influences dress (does it? in what way?). It is of particular interest to me how an academic environment (and not merely the knowledge gained from an education, which is how I’ve been interpreting the word education in our broad focus) influences dress, especially for women. Did (and do) women  feel compelled to adopt menswear detailing in order to align themselves with an institution (that of academia) that has been historically and traditionally so dominated by men? Do uniforms of academia such as graduation gowns and robes help to portray a person as being more closely aligned with their academic institution (and thus of greater seriousness or intellect)? This is the general thread that I am following in exploring a couple daisy chain dresses that we have in our collection.

My thoughts on the daisy chain dresses are still in their early formations, but I’ve begun to think about this issue as it applies to contemporary dress. This issue is still an incredibly relevant one – we have a long way to go before a professor in a pink dress will be perceived as an intellectual equal to her tweed jacket-wearing colleague. I have a lot of questions (and I’d love it if you’d help me explore them in the comments section): should a person seek to represent himself in a more traditionally academic way in order to help himself? Is it, then, necessary to dress in an academically “appropriate” (feel free to interpret this word in whatever way you choose) manner when going to class – as a student or as a professor? What about dressing intellectually, i.e. creating an outfit based on aesthetic principals or conceptual guidelines? Is an intellectual outfit less acceptable than an academic outfit within academia, and should this be the case?

I was browsing around the internet and encountered a string of fashion and/or style blogs written by academics that partially addressed the issues I’ve brought up in the above paragraph. http://fashionableacademics.blogspot.com/ is a blog written by a group of professors and grad students and is one of the more informative and provocative blogs I came across. They have a category of posts that they label with the tag “professartorial” where they post their outfits and discuss, to a certain extent, the thought process behind creating the outfit. It is refreshing for me to read the blog because it is unusual for either fashion or style to be acknowledged as interesting in any capacity by the academic community.

Now, this is just a blog written by a couple of friends about how they dress, and I acknowledge that, but by aligning their blog with academia in general I feel they’ve opened themselves up to the possibility of a little ideological criticism. When crafting their outfits, the most prominent guiding factor seems to be: is this appropriate for teaching in a classroom? The more serious the event (class lecture, department meeting) the more traditionally academic their outfits appear to become. I appreciate the amount of thought that they put into the appropriateness of their outfits, but I can’t help feeling unsatisfied. I know that not everyone feels compelled to intellectualize clothing, nor should they, but as academics and as self-proclaimed feminists I find their apparent lack of questioning to be a little troubling. They aim for appropriateness when it is called for, but do not question that nature of the appropriateness that they’re striving for. Yes, one wants to dress professionally in the workplace, but the standard of the professional appropriateness (especially in academia and corporations) is masculinized and traditionalized. Tweed and corduroy blazers are the epitome of academic appropriateness because they borrow from both traditionally masculine (blazer) and traditionally academic (tweed and corduroy) aesthetics.

This is not meant to be a critique of the way that these women and men dress, but rather a lens through which to view these issues. Why should a traditionally academic outfit command more academic respect than an outfit constructed to some conceptual end?

I’m hoping that these questions will help guide me through my research of the Daisy Chain dresses and other academic garments in our collection.  At what times did Vassar require a Daisy Chain uniform, and when did it allow students to express their personal taste more freely? At what point did Vassar switch from formal attire for graduation to the classic academic graduation gowns? What was going on in the college and in the world at these times that might have prompted the shift? There’s a lot to think about, and I hope to answer some of my own questions above in a part II to this post at the end of the semester.

P.S. Some other academic (or otherwise) style blogs that are relevant to this post: http://www.academichic.com, http://www.scholarstyleguide.com/, http://www.alreadypretty.com/2010/09/how-can-we-reclaim-traditionally.html, http://whatwouldanerdwear.blogspot.com/ and this post in particular http://whatwouldanerdwear.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-would-fashionable-academic-wear-to.html