Does it make sense to wear Harvard t-shirts without being a university student?

This February, Zara launched a university-inspired collection, which recreates the sportswear of two of the most prestigious academic institutions: Yale and Harvard. But it is not the first time we have seen clothes with the names of famous universities. In 2021, this trend already enjoyed a real boom and Tamara Falcó was photographed wearing a €15 university-style sweatshirt from H&M, while Kiabi, Asos, Stradivarius and Bershka sold similar pieces. That same year, Inditex also offered the Harvard sweatshirt that Diana of Wales wore in the famous episode when she ran down the street dodging the paparazzi for €17.95 in the children's section of Zara and Pull & Bear for €26. In fact, Lady Di was one of the great supporters of this fashion, as she had a generous catalogue of sweatshirts from various universities (despite not having studied at any), as well as the character of Rachel Green in the series Friends, which I used to wear around the house. This fervor was rekindled in 2023, when H&M launched a collection of Harvard, Columbia, UCLA and Oxford sweatshirts. Right now if we don't want to pay the almost €30 that Zara's ones cost, we can always turn to the Chinese companyultra fast fashion Temu, who sells the Yale sweatshirt for €9.43, with the courtesy of including the word "authentic"So that people don't doubt that we are students. But why is it that people, in many cases without university studies, are interested in clothing from academic institutions that they will probably never be part of?"

To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to turn to the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of "cultural capital" as a fundamental element in granting status and reproducing inequalities in contemporary societies. Specifically, in the United States, where social mobility and the American Dream are paraded, many inequalities arise from cultural capital, precisely in the hands of elitist universities, with very high prices and access controlled by belonging to a social elite. In the case of sweatshirt fashion, large chains will rarely sell from the UOC, the University of Extremadura or the Polytechnic of Chiapas, not because they do not teach quality studies, but because they are not socially recognized as clear symbols of status, as are the jackets of Ivy Lees.

In this case, brands such as Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Hacket and Abercrombie & Fitch often resort to the imaginary of the preppies The trend is similar to that of the 1950s Americans who attended prep schools to access Ivy League universities, or to the pedigree of English university campuses, to create aspirational class brands through cultural capital as a commercial lure. This trend is clearly motivated by the consumerist spirit of neoliberalism, which has made us believe that displaying wealth through clothing can bring us closer to truly possessing it. In this case, why spend four long years studying if for a modest price you can have the shirt? And under the idea that everything can be bought (even knowledge), it is on the same level to display false wealth through a Dior bag bought at the blanket top that boasting of having studied at Oxford without having set foot in its colleges. An elitist myth that has only grown through successful series such as Gossip girl, Elite, Young Highnesses and Maxton Hall and films like Saltburn, in which social privilege is developed without complexes in educational institutions. In any case, it is significant of the society we are building that, at a time of crisis of university prestige, it opts for the most superficial part of these academic institutions, that of feigning social class, rather than valuing their main objective: that of generating knowledge.