As the weather gets warmer and the snow melts off the ground, our bleak winter outfits begin to disappear. During the winter months, outfits are uniform-like: sweatshirts, sweatpants, a black puffer and snow boots.
But every so often, winter gives us a small taste of spring. There are those rare days when I check the weather app to see a whopping 50 degrees. At colleges down south, my friends post about how terribly cold a temperature like that is. For us Cornellians though, a 50 degree day is like a beach day. Some wear shorts, some clearly are tired of checking the weather app and mistakenly wear their uniforms, and some have been waiting for this day since they saw it was forecast last week.
I myself am the latter. I will have my outfit lined up like I did before every first day of school: neatly folded on my desk to not waste a minute in the morning and potentially miss a ray of sunshine. Yet, when you look at my outfit, you might be a little puzzled because, frankly, it’ll look like the leftovers of your dad’s closet — but that's exactly what I’m going for.
My chunky red boots did me a great service by preventing me from slipping in the seemingly abundant “no winter maintenance” zones, but unfortunately their time is over. It’s time to shed those bulky shoes for a classier, everyday staple. I was stumped. While trying to look for new shoes that were chic, yet practical, all I could think about was retiring back to Long Island for a summer in my flipflops, and that’s when it hit me: boat shoes.
As I sent my mom a picture for her approval, she simply replied with a picture of my dad’s. I guess we’ll be matching from 300 miles away.
But it didn’t just stop there.
On the days when a bleak, black puffer just didn’t seem right for the weather, I pulled out my overcoat. It elevated any outfit I wore, going from shivering in the snow, to strutting in the streets. I felt like I was waiting for a coffee chat every time I waited for my Temple of Zeus coffee.
But the outfit still felt like it was missing something. To fix that, I added the perfect accessory: an old baseball cap. Ironically, I stole it from my dad one summer day when he gave it to me and forgot to ask for it back. Cap on, my outfit was complete.
Somewhere along the way though, the outfit stopped feeling just trendy and started feeling strangely familiar. I’m not sure where the line is drawn between a trendy spring look and more like something your dad would wear. Or maybe it's just my dad — he always sings along when Taylor Swift comes on in the car and uses the newest slang when I come to think of it …
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that maybe dressing like a dad wasn’t a bad thing. Dads have just figured it out. Their style strikes the perfect balance between looking presentable while still being as comfortable as possible — an outfit that you can go to a lunch in, but also rush to the supermarket to pick up a steak for dinner. It looks effortless, classic and yet a little familiar.
And once spring arrived, it seemed like the whole campus was in on it too. Spring fashion is no longer buried under layers of snow and bitterness. The flowers are in bloom and so is a campus-wide embrace of practical, polished, vaguely suburban style.
Even if people don’t mean to dress like a suburban father on a weekend coffee run, that is the aesthetic. And clearly, I’ve grown into it too. My dad always called me his “little-me,” and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Somewhere between the dad jokes, the baseball cap and the boat shoes, I seem to have grown into the part.
Katherine Istomin is a member of the class of 2029 in the College of Arts and Sciences. She serves as Social Media Editor for the 144th Editorial Board and can be reached at kistomin@cornellsun.com.
