Oracle Online

If Project Runway came to Hamline, the fashion designers’ task would involve creating stylish sweatpants and functional pajama bottoms. A common and comfortable alternative to jeans, khakis, or any pants featuring those restricting zippers, sweatpants and especially pajama bottoms’ popularity is imposing an air of informality on the education setting.

In classes on campus, there’s always at least a few students donning such casual wear. On days that a student has sports practice, wakes up late, feels sick, or merely desires a lightweight pant offering greater flexibility and room to move, jeans and other pants are overlooked in favor of stretch waistbands. It’s tempting for people to put on pants that remind them of sleeping or lounging.

With many Hamline students choosing to wear sweatpants to class at some point in their college career, it doesn’t appear to pose any grave problems. Dressing informally too often though carries its risks.

For instance, it can make you fat. Too many days spent in different pairs of pajama bottoms and track pants can eliminate your perception of your waistline. Most elastic waistbands would allow the person sporting them to gain over five pounds before they noticed their pants getting tighter. Spend a few days in sweatpants, and putting on a pair of jeans later could be a reality shock.

Growing accustomed to wearing comfy pants around campus may also distort people’s judgment about the acceptability of going out in public in them. In a period of fashion marked by the sweat-suit haute couture made popular and attractive by Madonna and Spears, it usually is acceptable to appear in public in laid-back gearčat least, no one’s likely to stop you from doing it. But as I learned from my eye-opening experience at the bookstore, there are some places where nothing less than jeans is appropriate.

It’s a bothersome possibility that laid-back clothing expectations at school and in public could be indicative of a growing informality and lack of respectful care for professional appearance. Is it possible that the acceptance of consistently wearing pajama bottoms and sweatpants are representative of a broader social impertinence that gives rise to Casual Friday horror stories? Perhaps our generation, and to some extent the one before us, has started to embrace a more casual, less-professional standard for the work and learning environment.

This is in no manner a defense of the position that sweatpants are only as comfortable as fitted skirts or a relaxed pair of khakis. Some who cannot understand the “Sweatpants Movement” would employ the old idea that it’s not about the clothes you wear, its how you wear them. Some things are so much simpler and enjoyable to wear, like velvet instead of wool, V-necks instead of turtlenecks, stretch waistbands instead of unyielding buttons.

It’s simply more comfortable in pj’s. The implications of wearing them often in public though, can be damaging. It eliminates a small portion of Hamline’s professional appearance, especially when high-school-age prospectives arrive dressed better in their sweatshirts and jeans than the college students. There isn’t anything wrong with leaving the button-up pants in the closet once and a while, but a pair of khakis or a sweater vest would be great to see now and then.