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Abstract

In recent years, scholarly attention to professional dress as a form of nonverbal communication has faded into the background. However, I believe professional dress is an important area of study, considering the changing conditions in the world of work. Therefore, I decided to conduct this phenomenological study of the dress choices of female professors at a small, liberal arts college to discover what professional dress did for them internally and professionally. The analysis of the data suggests that these women try to use dress to represent themselves as who they are internally, without losing sight of their image as a professor, academic, and cultural member. Dress, for them, is a means of controlling and shaping who they view themselves to be into an appropriate external image of who they must be.

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