Has fashion’s current fascination with celebrity impacted life on campus? Definitely, and not just in matters of style. Though the Hollywood influence quakes strongest in California, it’s apparent across the country in how students dress, live and learn.
Barbara Bundy, vice president of Education at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, which has four campus sites in Southern California and counts Kevan Hall, Randolph Duke and Juicy Couture co-founder Pamela Skaist-Levy as alums, says she’s seen the shift just in the past six years. “That fusion of Hollywood fashion and education — never before did we touch on except in the theater or visual departments,” Bundy says. “It’s since become stronger and stronger in all areas of the curriculum.”
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But Hollywood’s impact on student life is not confined to the classroom, as the trends launched there inevitably find their way to the college quad. “‘The O.C.’” look is really popular on our Orange County campus,” Bundy says. “The students want to look just like the stars on that show. But even going back to the “Baywatch” days, students have wanted to emulate what they see on TV.”
That may be especially true for fashion students, but Rhea Cortado, a senior English major at UCLA, takes a more jaded view of Tinseltown’s effect on her college experience. “I don’t like premieres because they create a lot of traffic in Westwood Village, and they’re a mess. Freshmen love them, but after a while you hate them,” she says.
Angelenos take for granted their physical proximity to the people and places that make the pages of glossy magazines. Professors often take it for granted that their student have a fluency in the language of Hollywood, and they use it even in unrelated courses. Says Cortado, “I had a Chaucer professor who was known for using movie metaphors. But in our Restoration Drama class I learned that there were gossipy trade papers about actors back then. These ideas carry over time and they are always a convenient example.”
Kristin Stimpson, a senior communications study major at Loyola Marymount University, a private college in the heart of Los Angeles, sees it up close and personal. “I grew up in a cow town,” she recalls. Now, she’s often sitting in class with sons and daughters of the celebrities whose styles get knocked-off in those Melrose boutiques. “LMU is a little enclave of Hollywood clones,” she says. “Girls wear everything from sorority letters with Gucci logos inside of them to Juicy tracksuits.”
Because much of LMU’s student body comes from privileged backgrounds, plenty of students can afford $400 Manolo Blahniks not to mention Land Rover Defenders just like Ashton Kutcher’s or Hummers like Ah-nuld’s. “I don’t know if it’s just L.A. or our generation, but it seems like everything is about Hollywood,” observes Stimpson. “And for some students, it’s not just what they read in magazines, but it’s who they hang out with or who they see.”
But what about campus life outside of California? Aja Marsh, a senior visual arts major at University of Florida at Gainesville, notices the Hollywood references less on student’s backs and more in the classroom. “I find a lot of professors trying to bring movies into the curriculum because they think it’s something we can all relate to,” she says. And they’re right: Marsh and her pals host themed movie nights at their off-campus apartments, where even the food matches the movie genre.
At the University of Texas at Austin, seemingly the one place in Texas where many students pride themselves on being anti-glamour and focused on business, engineering or the indie music scene, photojournalism grad student Caroling Lee says Hollywood-inspired fashion is hard to come by. “Glamour doesn’t go very far here,” Lee says. “I’d venture to say that students even look down on those who lead glamorous lives, unless you’re talking about musicians, and that’s in a more soulful and less traditional sense.”
Season Clark, an Arizona State University communications major who graduated last winter, didn’t see herself as part of the Hollywood-emulating pack either, but she has seen its effects. “I would agree that party girls dress on trend with Hollywood,” says Clark. “When Sarah Jessica Parker was wearing those flowers a couple of years ago I saw them all over campus. It was such a subtle thing but it was everywhere.” Hollywood has affected Clark’s circle in others in other ways as well. “We had “Friends”-watching parties every week, and so did a local bar near campus,” she says. And what life lessons did they glean from years of watching Rachel Green and Chandler Bing? “Guys are a lot more metro now than when I started school six years ago. Now it’s OK to for them highlight their hair because they see guys on TV doing it.”