Yesterday in class one of my students said one of her other
professors, a seemingly sane man in his fifties, was wearing dress slacks and
the seam in the crotch was unstitched, leaving an opening, which she found
appalling. She gave no more details about the incident as she seemed somewhat
traumatized by it, but she did say the next class meeting the professor wore
the same slacks and that the stitch had been sewed so that there was no longer
a hideous gaping aperture.
As a teacher who is very self-conscious about wearing the
same clothes two days in a row, I wondered if the professor guilty of the
sartorial gaffe in question was making a statement to his students: “Look,
folks, yesterday I screwed up big time. I just want you to know I’ve got
everything under control now. The problem won’t happen again.”
Sometimes it is appropriate, necessary even, for a professor
to wear the same clothes two lectures in a row.
I too have been guilty of fashion fouls. More than once in the early 1990s (and perhaps inspired by the popularity of Seinfeld), when it was fashionable to wear shirts tucked into trousers with a belt (now I wear all my shirts untucked), students felt compelled to inform me that I had missed one, sometimes two, belt loops and I had to excuse myself and return to class with my belt correctly looped.
More embarrassing, I had on a few occasions come to class with clothes that still bore the stickers and tags on the them. What made this especially humiliating was that these were not tags worthy of boasting. To the contrary, these were tags from discount department stores like Mervyn’s and Target.
I now shop exclusively at Banana Republic so that in the
event of leaving my tags on my clothes, I will at least be afforded some
remaining scrap of my dignity.
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