WHITING: Forgo the white tennis shoes?

They say that if you’re traveling to Paris, you ought not to wear white tennis shoes. It screams American.

This might be true, though jogging in the Luxembourg Gardens is getting trendier, so wearing workout gear at le café might (maybe) be acceptable. What is definitely true is that the one French student I made friends with last semester wore suits to class regularly. He looked nice — not weird — because formality in Europe is commonplace. In Paris —even if you’re a student — you’re expected to dress well. Similarly, Oxfordites in the U.K. grace pubs wearing blazers with elbow patches. Meanwhile, boys at the bars here wear hockey jerseys. I’m just saying.

Excuse the following sweeping and potentially offensive generalization, but I think it’s a worldwide consensus that Americans dress pretty casually. My father, for example, though a distinguished surgeon, mostly wears jeans that are 15 years old with holes in them. And people still like him. I’m not saying la moda americana is inherently slouchy or careless. But it does accept the extremely casual. Moreover, I actually think there’s a stigma against caring too much, as if taking one’s appearance seriously implies selfishness and frivolity. America the Beautiful, of course, will have little to do with such things.

Case in point: the other day I grabbed lunch with a friend from Oslo. “Can I wear yoga pants to Panera?” I asked her. “Yes Anne, this is America.” She was right; I was not judged.

So apologies for the frivolous subject at hand, but I like fashion. I’ve been reading the magazines since the fourth grade, I’ve studied at Parsons and I’ve been to London Fashion Week. I own many sequined sweaters. In Europe, I did not wear tennis shoes. I learned to wear heels on a daily basis (and this is no small feat on the steps of the metro). Here, however, if I wear, say, my high-heeled purple suede boots to class, I feel like I look superficial and abrasively colorful and like I spent more time on my outfit than I did on the reading.

I should be bold about my clothing preferences, but that’s another argument and I’m working on a word limit.

Campus fashion seems to me an oxymoronic topic. It mostly looks like a many-variety-ed approach to jeans and T-shirts. Of course, you have to consider what “fashion” around here really means. To me, the term suggests a few different things. First, there’s the “fashion” that refers to what people of a certain demographic are generally wearing. Second, there’s personal and individual “fashion.” You find both of these on campus.

But then there’s the “fashion” that you see in Vogue and on the Sartorialist blog — the stuff on the streets of Paris and Milan and downtown New York that shows up on fashion websites everywhere but nowhere at the George Sherman Union. That’s because campus “fashion” is hardly fashionable.

Sorry, that sounds bigoted. I’m not Anna Wintour (yet). Also, I like jeans and T-shirts. I wear them all the time. But I do know that my foreign friends give American students a pretty hard time. A good friend of mine here hails from London. She’s always dressed to the nines. (I realize this could have nothing to do with the London bit, but bear with me). She’s a fashion blogger on campus, so she’s pretty observant. “I would say that men at BU are most guilty of the sloppy, sweatpants look,” she laments. “I spent almost three hours once searching for my weekly Fashionisto [post] … ’nuff said.”

She’s right. We like sweatpants. They’re great, and I almost feel bad for the Parisians and their suits. Maybe it’s my Midwestern roots that let me embrace sloth (I’m a huge advocate of fleece and Uggs), or maybe it really is just because I’m American and I’m used to baseball T-shirts and workout shorts. As for those students in pajama pants, if you have the self-confidence to look that bad just because it’s college and you can (Carpe Diem!), you have my respects.

Vogue “fashion” has a time and a place. (Wintour will never hire me for saying that.) I feel like the life of alarm clocks and late nights in the library justifies sweats and slippers. We live here, after all. And we have a number of things to do, some of which are more important than finding the right color denim. I have a friend in New York, for example, who’s a straight-A Ivy League-er and a football player, all while running his own nonprofit. He wears sweatpants everyday.

He has other things to worry about than sequins. That message is very clear. We speak through clothes. How a person dresses affects how they connect with people. Thus on an American university campus, purple suede boots are considered unpractical and make their wearer (me) feel silly. Don’t worry, I’ll get over it.

Clothes say a lot about a person and a culture, inevitably. If we speak through them, perhaps we also profess nationalities. But like I said, I’m being extremely general. Sweatpants are not the only look on campus. People do dress up. My blogger friend calls BU a melting pot of fashion profiles, and she does find things to write about. But compared to where she comes from, apparently the standards are certainly different. I know she’s right — at the Sorbonne I never once saw a student in sweats. Or white tennies.