Deidre Clemente (History) has written a book, Dress Casual: How College Students Redefined American Style (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), a lively history of fashion on American college campuses. Whether it's jeans and sneakers or khakis with a polo shirt, chances are college kids made it cool. The modern casual American wardrobe, she argues, was born in the classrooms, dormitories, fraternity and sorority houses, and gyms of universities and colleges across the country. As young people gained increasing social and cultural clout during the early 20th century, their tastes transformed mainstream fashion from collared and corseted to comfortable. From East Coast to West Coast and from the Ivy League to historically Black colleges and universities, changing styles reflected new ways of defining the value of personal appearance, and, by extension, new possibilities for creating one's identity.
