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“Who are you wearing today?” The question is an awards show cliché, asked of every female celebrity making her way down a red carpet. The repeated asking and answering of this question drives and shapes the multi-billion dollar fashion industry that designs, markets, and manufactures the clothes; the stylists who curate clothes and accessories; the television and film industries which seem to increasingly exist in order to create these profitable red carpet spectacles; and the many magazines and websites whose primary content is photos of celebrities in designer garments. These symbioses have existed since the birth of film as a popular medium, but the mutualism has been especially adaptive to our current digital ecology.

But really, who are you wearing today? Asked of a cultural critic, the question will get a different reception. Trained to turn such cultural tropes and clichés inside out, we immediately begin to examine their seams and construction. Looking at the question critically, we might show how the question points us to the deeply exploitative labor conditions in which most clothing is produced today (and, truthfully, has been in almost all time periods). We know that the complex stories behind each t-shirt or formal gown are grossly undersignified by the tags that reveal the garments’ country of origin. We might look at the clothing on a celebrity’s body and try to tell the stories of whom she is really wearing—the farmer who grew the cotton, the tanner who skinned the calf, and everyone else who moved the garment from its rawest state into her closet. We’re good at seeing that this is a question worth attention, that it tells us something about the state of a particular commodity fetish in our current moment, that it might lead somewhere interesting.

But who are you wearing today? It’s not a question offered up for critical interrogation this time, but rather a real question, meant to make you look down at your body and see what clothes you put on earlier today. For most of us, this is a much more difficult question to answer, since it now becomes a question that cuts through our own individual gender, class, and professional identities, down to our often ambivalent senses of who we think we are and who we wish others to think we are. A December 3, 2012 photo-essay by Stacey Patton in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests the volatile nature of this question among academics. It profiles three scholars who are identified in the piece as “black dandies.” The term “black dandy” is clearly grounded in a scholarly context by the introduction to the photo-essay, which references Monica L. Miller’s 2009 book on the topic, Slaves to Fashion. The piece presents Miller’s argument that African-American “men in particular have ‘styled their way from slaves to dignified human beings.’” (The CHE also offers an ancillary audio interview with Miller in a blog post by Brock Read.) The act of dressing oneself is, we are reminded, a deeply political act in which each one of us participates every morning of our lives. Our clothing choices make our personal identities and politics visible—open to interpretation and misinterpretation by anyone who can see us. The extent to which we remain unaware of this often correlates with the kinds of cultural privilege to which we have access.

In the “Black Dandies Fashion New Academic Identities” photo-essay, scholars Hasan Kwame Jeffries (History, Ohio State), Sharon P. Holland (African and African American Studies, Duke), and Ernest L. Gibson (English, Rhodes College) are all photographed in their homes, outdoors, and on campus, modeling their favorite looks. Quotes from each scholar accompany their pictures; these quotes make clear both their keen senses of the complex politics of their sartorial choices and their genuine pleasure in the selection and wearing of carefully chosen clothes. When I first encountered this piece online, I was struck by the bravery of those who accepted the invitation to be part of it. We are used to...