Against the drab backdrop of grey Gothic buildings encircling the quad, a figure adorned in bright colors consistently stands out. Easily recognizable around campus, professor Agnes Callard and her wardrobe are campus celebrities to many. As an associate professor of philosophy with a focus in ethics and ancient philosophy, a public scholar, and communicator, Callard frequently brings philosophical insights to a broad audience through her work in public philosophy. In this interview, the Maroon sits down with Agnes Callard to talk about her personal style, social media, and the philosophy of fashion.
The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
CHICAGO MAROON: Professor Callard, thanks for sitting down to talk with me about fashion. How would you describe your personal style?
Agnes Callard: My sister describes it as “giant kindergartener.” A kindergartener, but huge. Honestly, just a lot of bright colors and different patterns. Other people might not think it matches, but in my mind, it matches.
CM: Where do you draw this fashion inspiration?
AC: I do like the style of kindergarteners, I have to say. I think that just what children viscerally gravitate towards, bright colors and patterns, are the things that I viscerally gravitate towards. It may be that I have just a very undeveloped aesthetic sensibility.
I love art supply stores, just for the colors. I will just hang out in our supply stores and look at all their pencils and pens and paints. In a way, patterns are a way to see colors, patterns are the way that colors show up to us. I see patterns as like the serving dish on which color is served up, it all boils down to color at the end.
I think that’s what I’m going for, ways to apprehend color.
CM: On October 23, in response to a clip from The Devil Wears Prada, you tweeted, “beauty is an important human value, some clothes are beautiful, hence, dressing is an opportunity to add value to your life in the world.”
What, to you, makes some clothes beautiful and not others?
AC: I think a lot of different things can make clothes beautiful.
I’m able to appreciate beautiful clothing that I would not wear. For me, “beautiful” and what I’m attracted to are not coextensive, though there’s an overlap [in] that I think the clothing that I like is beautiful. I don’t think it’s the only thing that’s beautiful. There are certain kinds of clothing that I will not wear because they cause me too much discomfort, like high heels or anything that’s constricting, basically. I don’t like makeup, but I like it for other people.
I don’t know that I have a general theory, and that’s one of the hard things about beauty, is that it seems very particular. It very much seems to be a case where you sort of know it when you see it. In the case of my own clothing, I guess I do think that largely my judgment of beauty is based on color and the degree to which the garment brings color to the fore. I think that can even happen with something that’s black and white, because black and white are also colors if the pattern does a sufficient amount of work to bring those colors to the fore, though it’s easier to do with non-black and white, I think.
In my own case, the subset of beauty that I’m interested in, in terms of my own clothing, tends to be kind of maximizing the color impact of the item. But that’s not a general theory. And I think I just don’t have a theory that generalizes all my fashion appreciations. I often will see fashion models or whatever, people on Twitter, they’re looking very fashionable and attractive. I think they look fashionable and attractive, but if you ask me, why do you think that looks good? I don’t have an account of it. The part of beauty I have an account of is the same part as the [one] that I participate in.
CM: Is monochrome something you see yourself experimenting with, or are you looking more to maximize color impact by combining colors?
AC: It depends. There are times when I do get very into monochrome. This year, for Halloween, I was pink, the color.
I wore things that were all different shades of pink. That was like me trying to fully experience pink. I do try to do monochrome sometimes, but the issue is that you really need the same shade, which is very hard to get.
I don’t buy my clothes all in one place. I might buy a shirt that’s a shade of red, and I might buy a pair of pants. It’s a really similar shade of red, but it’s not exactly the same shade of red. Either you have to be kind of doing the thing where you do a bunch of different shades, like I did with pink, but then you’ve really got to wear a lot of pink. I had a pink hair thing, and I had a pink belt too, and pink socks and pink shoes, and I even had a pink bag, all of it. At that point, you’re really committing to the bit.
You need a lot of different items. And I often just don’t have that many different items on me. I would say I incline towards the non-monochrome. Though something that I am attracted towards and do quite frequently is, if some fashion brand might be selling a pair of pants with a pattern, and then a shirt with the same pattern, I will buy both. Then I can wear them together. That’s a kind of monochrome, right? It is a monochrome of pattern.
I do think that when you get the same pattern in different places in an outfit or a dress, like this dress, you’d really experience the pattern to a greater degree than, you know, if you just have solid-color leggings like I have on now.
CM: Would you say your personal style is influenced by some of today’s trends?
AC: I think that the way that I dress has actually become more popular over, say, the past, I don’t know, five or 10 years, just because it’s become easier for me to find clothing. I’ve gone in and out of wearing color for clothing over the course of my life. The current bout of it probably started around 2016. At the beginning, I was buying all my clothing from Australia, in Melbourne. I went there eventually, like a pilgrimage. But for years and years, I’d been buying my clothing from Melbourne and had never been there.
Melbourne was an all-black city. Everyone wore black. Then, as a kind of a rebellion against that, one or two fashion companies popped up like, “We’re gonna do bright colors.” There are a couple of companies in Melbourne that are making really brightly colored clothing. I’ve looked online and from different countries such as Australia and Scandinavia. Marimekko is a brand that makes beautiful colorful clothing. Beyond clothes, Marimekko is a company that makes a lot of what you see on the walls of my office.
There are some companies in places like Italy and France and stuff, but the women there are just a lot smaller than me, and so I don’t fit into any of their clothing. Australian women, Scandinavian women, and U.K. women are more my size, so that partly affects where I buy my clothing. In fashion, there’s some tendency to not make clothing in big sizes. I think the company feels that they’re more of a prestige brand if they don’t. That’s changing, which is great. But I can’t just find some beautiful Italian brand and then just be like, “Oh, I’ll just buy extra-extra-extra-large” or whatever, because they won’t have extra-large [sizes], so they’ll just have it up to a certain point.
I was once in France in a store, and I was asking them for size 44 or whatever I was in French sizing, and they said, “That doesn’t exist.” I’m like, “It has to exist. I’m it! It exists!”
Our back-and-forth of “it doesn’t exist, it does exist” was a funny little argument. This was a long time ago. This was in the 1990s, they probably wouldn’t do that now. Before, I was buying stuff from Australia and Finland… really just Marimekko. So that’s where my clothing was coming from, though often not directly, often through Facebook groups, but the clothing originally came from those places.
Then, over the past few years, I’ve discovered U.S.-, Canada-, and U.K.-based companies, so I like coming closer to home. Other than Marimekko, some of my other favorites include: Gorman, Obus, Variety Hour, Mokuyobi, Birds of North America, Lucy & Yak, Big Bud Press, Nooworks, and Outsiders Division.
It’s great. The shipping is never that expensive, even from Australia to me. But if it doesn’t fit, sending it back costs a fortune. Whereas, if it’s in the US, returning is not bad.
That’s what makes a difference in terms of shopping and figuring out the sizing of women’s clothing, cause it’s kind of all over the place. You can’t just be like, “Oh, I’m like a large. I’ll just buy a large.” Because you might be an extra-extra-large in this thing and a small in something else. These are the difficulties.
I’ve just taken that as evidence that my way of dressing has become more popular, given that it’s easier for me to get clothing like this. When I was in high school, I just bought a lot of vintage clothing. Except that I had the same problem. I’ve never been small, and women in the past were smaller. So you go to a used clothing store and most of the clothing is, from my point of view, tiny. Those are my bits of evidence in terms of the popularity of dressing in this way.
CM: In The Fashion System, Roland Barthes writes, “Fashion is a refusal to inherit a subversion against the oppression of the proceeding.” Dress codes in professional settings often dictate the status quo of fashion. Do you see your subversion of academic fashion’s status quo as an end in and of itself?
AC: I think that it’s definitely not the end in and of itself. Like, when I am in a completely non-academic context, I dress the same way. That would be evidence. I think that it is relevant in a certain way, there is an effect that I notice that I approve of, which is, I think as an academic, you’re always balancing approachability against respect. That is, the more people respect you, the less approachable you seem, and the more approachable you seem, the less they respect you. In general, I feel like, in terms of where I am on that, I’m very happy to push in the direction of approachability away from respect. That is, I feel like I have plenty of respect.
I want people to feel like they can talk to me, like they can ask me a question. That they can pursue an inquiry with me, like they can show up to my office hours as somebody just did right before you, a first-year student I’ve never met before, who hasn’t studied philosophy, who wanted to talk to me about free will. I think dressing the way I do is [going to] make that more likely.
Partly, with respect to my students and my job here within the confines of the University, but also more broadly as a public philosopher out in the world, it’s to my benefit if people feel like they can talk to me. That’s a sense of [the] subversive, in the sense that I’m not very concerned to sort of entrench my own respectability. That’s probably just because as an academic, you just get plenty of respect.
I could well imagine that I could be in a position in the world where I did need to do that, right? It’s a contingent fact of “you’re a professor, professor comes before your name.” You know when that’s known about you, when you enter into a relationship with people where you’re automatically their teacher, that that’s just already a high respect situation to start out with.
CM: This July, you tweeted, “Airports are a mecca for fashion compliments. I always choose flying outfits with extra care.”
If you had to give our readers advice on how to maximize clothing compliment potential, what would your top pieces of advice be?
AC: Number one really would be about the airports. Dress up for the airport, especially the security people. In security, they are always looking at clothes. I always feel very vindicated when they like my clothes, because the TSA people get to compare clothing all day. A lot of comments and compliments from TSA people.
Also to dress up at the dentist’s office. The dentist appreciates your clothing. They are also people who, like, look at your clothing and will not fail to notice if I like, don’t dress up one time for the dentist. They’ll be like, “Oh, you’re dressed down today,” or something. That’s how close attention they’re paying.
I also think that there [are] pieces of clothing that get more compliments. Like jumpsuits, especially patterned jumpsuits. I would say, like, maybe the number one compliment-getter is going to be patterned jumpsuits. People just love jumpsuits. I’m not sure why it could be.
I think that this is maybe a slightly dark thought. Though I don’t know how dark it is: I think people love it when women wear clothing that’s sort of attractive, but not at all sexy. Women especially like it because it’s like, “you’re not competing with me.”
I feel like there’s something in there, there’s something in that space. In terms of items of clothing. That’s what gets the most compliments.
I follow this jumpsuit brand that I’ve only actually bought one jumpsuit from, they’re called Big Bud Press. They have a store in Chicago. I’ve been to it, it’s very nice. They were actually featured on Wirecutter recently for their jumpsuits.
And then a Facebook group I’m in of fans of this kind of jumpsuit noted that the Facebook page was all like, just super mean. The comments were horribly mean. Maybe lots of people actually hate jumpsuits, but those people don’t come up to me in real life. It could actually be the case that fashion compliments are just a super high-variance situation. The situations where I’m getting the most compliments are also where I’m, like, offending the most people, where the most people are like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe how she’s dressed,” but they just don’t tell me. Versus, when you go online, one time I posted a kind of spreadsheet photo of a whole bunch of outfits online. Oh, my god, people were so mean.
And I was like, wow, when I wear these outfits out in public, everyone’s like, “You look amazing.” And then when I posted online, everyone’s like, “You’re horrible. You look terrible. You look like a clown,” whatever. I was thinking, “What a disparity.”
It could just be that people aren’t very brave, and so people who think I look terrible in my jumpsuits don’t come up to me and tell me that. It’s really the high-compliment situations that are also the high-hidden-insult situations.
CM: It seems the bolder of a decision you make, the more you appeal to certain people but also steer away from the tastes of others.
AC: Exactly, it’s high variance in that sense. I feel very comfortable posting online, in my Facebook groups, where we’re very supportive of each other in our color choices, but I’ve learned not to post it on Twitter. Occasionally I will, and still, most people are nice. What happened was there was one post that got picked up by some bigger account.
When it’s just in my circles, people are still pretty nice. People will say stuff online that they won’t say in real life. And maybe you wouldn’t have that big of a benefit to you to go out of your way and make me find out. It’s actually the better scenario if they just kept it to themselves and you never knew.
CM: I just wanted to follow up on your comment earlier about how social media and online presence interacts with fashion. What are your thoughts on the onslaught of “fit pics” and “fit checks” that dominate social media nowadays?
AC: Social media is important for me in having clothes, because I buy a lot of my clothes as used. I buy my clothes on Facebook groups. I will always try to buy something used rather than buying it new if I can.
I buy some of it on eBay, but a lot on Facebook groups. On those same Facebook groups, they also post photos of their outfits. I think that that’s actually a slightly different world from the “fit check” Instagram world, which I’m not really active on… And I suspect that that is a lot like when I was younger, people would look at fashion magazines, and there would just be these women who have bodies very different from your body.
That will very naturally put you in a bad mindset about your whole appearance. So, like, I just had to just stay away from that. But that’s really not what Facebook groups are like. The Facebook groups are women like me, both in the sense that many of them are my age or older than me and [that] they don’t have perfect model bodies.
They just have average bodies like anybody else, and they’re just people who are wearing the same kind of clothing that I like. Those are the fashion spaces that I tend to like.
CM: Professor Callard, thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with readers regarding fashion?
AC: I will say one thing. If you’re interested in my views about color, I have an essay coming out in Liberties magazine. I think it’s only going to be coming out in the spring, so just keep an eye out for it. If you follow me on Twitter, I’ll tweet about it once it comes out, but my whole philosophy of color is going to be explored in that essay.
