How to Dress Like an Architect

At any given official function of the Notre Dame School of Architecture, my alma mater, anywhere between fifty and seventy-five percent of the males present are wearing some form of bow tie. Probably some women are too; statistical averages on the subject are hard to get. Ever since Julia Morgan died, female architects tend to be a bit thin on the ground. I’ve heard rumors that we might declare war on the School of Arts and Letters next year and steal their women, though that’s probably wishful thinking on my part.

Nonetheless, despite this handicap, most of the architecture faculty are married, and happily so, with large, delightfully sprawling Catholic families. Obviously the bow ties are attractive to someone, for all the muttering criticism I sometimes hear from my friends on the distaff side of the cosmos. And if you, O aspiring architect, are not in the market for a large, sprawling Catholic family, the sex appeal of the architect is not just a family-man sort of thing.

The architectural bow tie is an absolute aphrodisiac, you see. It’s even a little bit dangerous in that regard.

Really. Frank Lloyd Wright had women swarming over him well into his dotage. And, as for Stanford White, belle-epoque New York’s Don Juan of the drafting table, it worked entirely too well and he ended up getting shot by a jealous husband on the roof of Madison Square Garden, a lavishly-detailed pleasure palace he himself had designed years earlier.

Memo to self: avoid chorus girls named Evelyn Nesbitt.

Destructive tragic affairs aside—and I am very sure that none of our professors are going to get shot on top of Bond Hall or while inspecting the progress of construction at Clear Creek Monastery—there is a startling and faintly comic turn to the uniform tweedy nattiness common to Homo architectus. Some people smirk, some people smile, some people just stare, but I approve. I’ve had non-architectural teachers in the past who have worn just about everything and anything, from perilously tight jeans to clogs and muu muus to frumpy salmon button-down shirts and sneakers, so to see Professor Thomas Gordon Smith ascend the podium in the full armor of the Vitruvian Man, tweeds and splendid butterfly-bright bow tie, is a real pleasure.

There are deviations from the uniform, of course. Take Professor Duarte, for example. You remember him: he’s our redoubtable baroque maniac and wine-tasting enthusiast who’s given to sprinkling his conversation with a wonderfully surreal blend of weird pop culture and esoteric academic gibberish. He always always sports a pair of pink spectacles while touring—the original rose-colored glasses. As a man who attacked each and every building with manic enthusiasm (and bad disco-related jokes), made googly faces at his newborn daughter, and cracked bad puns even in the hallowed chapels of the Vatican—which, as I informed him, is not a sin—he’s definitely someone who, both figuratively and literally, should be wearing rose-colored glasses.

On the other hand, too much conformity has its problems. The sizable and varied wardrobe of bow-ties that most architects sport generally alleviates most difficulties, as I’ve never seen two professors wear the same tie at once. As the party mix and sausages on sticks make their rounds at a reception, one can see anything and everything from tasteful middle-of-the-road numbers to extravagant gilded moths of yellow silk and teeny-tiny red numbers worn for comic affect. And patterned stuff like hounds’-tooth blazers tend to have a lot of variety, too; at the very least you can always slap on a pair of suede elbow patches and a sweater vest if you really insist on sticking out. Some people also think you could slip a black turtleneck in under the radar, but perhaps only if you’re from Manhattan. There, it’s part of your birthright. Elsewhere, it depends probably on the amount of glass, blank white walls and people named Nigel at the gallery opening you’re going to.

And there’s always the option of taking the party line and pushing it to some Borrominian limit. Take Dr. Guimarães for example. She’s the only woman I know who can not only successfully wear two kinds of plaid at once, but who can also sweep into the studio in the middle of a miserably bitter winter week decked out in a floor-length fur coat and a hat worthy of a particularly flashy Russian grand duchess. And more power to her: anyone who knows as much as she does about Romano-Byzantine floor tiles has the right to stick out in a crowd.

Still, there’s always that one horrible thought that some day the algorithms will add up and the impossible will happen, and two great architects will face each other across the open bar and discover with horror that they’re wearing the same bow tie. The unthinkable has happened before: I remember once when two of our faculty took us on a tour of a project site one cold South Bend afternoon in the depths of winter and they both showed up wearing the exact same black beret. My friend S. is still traumatized by the incident: she stopped wearing any sort of headgear shortly thereafter and weeps uncontrollably at any mention of Marcel Marceau. Well, I made that last part up: but she stopped wearing hats, seriously.

For what it’s worth, the professional, day-to-day world outside the glamour domes of New York and Chicago (and South Bend, Indiana), don’t seem to require that full dress uniform nine to five. They’re boat shoes and polo shirt people. If you’re either good enough for your boss not to care or weird enough not to care yourself you can probably sneak in a tee shirt and baggy shorts, though that guy skateboarded to work and didn’t have a wife, so I wouldn’t recommend that: the Stanford White architectural charisma can only go so far with women. They gotta have something to work with.

That being said, though, I hope some day I’ll sport a bow tie when I put up my shingle and join up with a firm. Maybe it’s stiff and silly, or outdated in this era of casual Fridays, but I’ll rally ‘round the bow tie yet. Plus, it’s not like I can help it: something just starts happening to your DNA when you study classical architecture. Your ears start to perk up at words like “Corinthian” and “cyma reversa,” and you suddenly develop an overpowering fascination with tweed sport-coats that were last worn by the late Lord Kenneth Clark.

(Nota bene: If also you start mispronouncing words in a grandiloquently patrician manner, like bahr-OCK for baroque or cah-PIT-alism for Al Greenspan, you are not turning into an architect but a documentary film host. We have medications for that.)

In my case, though, the unstoppable transformation to homo architectus has already begun. I’ve already gotten my first patterned blazer, a real tasteful number in muted greens and browns, not your plain-vanilla blue with gold buttons. I haven’t gotten in too deep yet, but it’s just a matter of time. Some day, I’ll wake up to discover that I’m now one of THEM. My entire wardrobe will have been replaced in the night by their stealthy agents, and hanging on the tie rack—there will suddenly be a tie-rack—will be a forest of new bow ties.