Santa Clara's Fashion Sense

By Feliz Moreno

The next time you are walking around campus, take a look around and count how many people you see sporting dreadlocks. Or count how many students you see with brightly colored hair, mohawks, wearing tie-dye or a trench coat.

Then try counting how many people you see wearing Tom's, leggings or North Face attire. It will probably be too many to count.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with wearing Tom's, North Face, J. Crew or Abercrombie everyday — that is as long as you're okay with looking like everyone else on campus. It seems that looking like everyone else is actually a goal of Santa Clara students.

If you visit other, more traditionally liberal campuses, it's not strange to see students sporting cargo pants, long hair or trench coats. It's not strange to walk onto a community college campus and see students our age with hair dyed purple or blue with numerous piercings adorning their face.

Our generation is noted as being big on physical self-expression, but you would never know it based on our student body.

Santa Clara students seem to have an aversion to self-expression through dress. I am surprised when I see tattoos poking out of shirtsleeves or a face with more piercings than usual.

There is a girl in one of my classes who has pink streaks in her hair, and I was surprised by it. I was also impressed to see a guy wearing bright orange Crocs in the library, but I shouldn't be.

Coming from a large public high school with all kinds of cliques and characters, it should not have been of any surprise to me, but here on our clean-cut campus it seems out of place.

Maybe the student style on campus is streamlined because many of our students want to maintain a professional appearance at all times. In that case, I would say that we are still students and while going to class every day might seem like a very serious matter, now may be our last opportunity to sport that crazy hair style that is discouraged in the professional world.

Maybe it is because we lack personality — although I am positive that is not the case. Personally, I think the professional business world and pressure to fit in has too much influence over our students. I mean, we aren't in high school anymore, so why should we be judging each other based on the way we present ourselves?

Maybe we all dress the same because we are all afraid of looking like we don't fit in. The campus climate is not one that is wary of people who walk around campus wearing baggy jeans and gold chains, or people with numerous tattoos and spiky hair. Theres no doubt some students here feel pressured to dress like everyone else. College should be one of the few times in our lives when we can worry less about our physical appearance and more about our mental enrichment. So why do so many students on our campus feel so much pressure to cut their hair, remove their piercings and trade in feathers and fishnets for cardigans and T-shirts?

Of course, I say all this as a girl who rarely wears anything more interesting than jeans and a T-shirt. I feel like I can't even go out on campus wearing tye-die without getting funny looks (and I thought tye-die had lost its "hippie" stigma over the last decade or so and become pretty main stream, but maybe I was wrong). Or maybe our student body should just lighten up and dare to step out looking different once in awhile.

The next time you want to wear those grungy looking boots, or that gothic make up or "hippie" hair, I urge you to do it. There is nothing wrong with dressing different from the mainstream. It at least makes life interesting.

Feliz Moreno is a sophomore English major and editor of the Opinion section.