As a part of The Cavalier Daily’s 130 year anniversary, we are republishing articles from our archive. This article originally ran in The Cavalier Daily March 23, 1993.
There is a common belief here at the University that a sort of unspoken dress code exists. This dress code allows khakis, a baseball hat, jeans, duck boots for the rain and snow and cowboy boots for the rest of the weather.
“You have to have duck boots and cowboy boots to go to” the University, first-year College student Carrie Yeatman said.
Although she said this is a prominent look, first-year College student Amy Lavine said some students do not follow this style of dress.
Gail Esposito, a first-year College student from Long Island, N.Y., said students at the University are much more conservative than the people at home.
“In New York, girls have big hair and many of the guys wear gold jewelry.”
First-year Eric Weingarten described the “guidos” in his hometown of Buffalo, N.Y. “They wear a lot of college garb from colleges they could never get into. It’s symbolics — not like wearing U.Va. stuff because they wear it for status.”
A typical “guido,” according to Weingarten, wears a UNLV hat, UNC Tar Heels shirt, a Buffalo Bills jacket, jeans halfway down his butt and big, clonky, untied basketball shoes two sizes too big.
In the tropical weather of Florida, “four-inch heels are normal, and there’s a lot of spandex,” first-year College student and Miami resident Michelle Weeks said.
Weeks arrived at the University in the fall with four pairs of high heels and one pair of sandals. In Florida “you could wear white shoes in the middle of winter and nobody cared.”
Weeks finds the fashion in Miami, with all its bright flashy colors and prints and super-short shorts revealing lots of skin, freer and more creative.
“You don’t have to match your socks with your watch” in Miami, she said.
‘In Florida there are no fashion seasons,” said Mollie Hines, a first-year College student who visited Orlando in January.
“You can be sitting next to someone in a wool suit, and the person on your other side will have on a pastel dress and white shoes,” Hines said.
Southern California has its differences, too. Second-year College student Barbara Allen is from San Clemente and said the University is a lot more formal than her hometown. “I would have died of shock to see a guy in a dress shirt at home,” she said.
“People show their bodies more [in California]. Skirts are shorter,” she added.
Like in Florida, Allen said people in California are not confined by the colors of the season. “I never thought of not wearing white in the winter until I got here.”
Although Hines said she thinks students at the University seem concerned with fashion faux pas, Allen said the differences in dress can be attributed to the way people in different regions are brought up. “In California, [sic] there are no high school dress codes and people sometimes wear bathing school tops to school,” Allen said. Virginia seems to have stricter rules, and students tend to dress more conservatively, she said.
Transcribed by Kate Granruth
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