Gown and tam for graduation

[summers_off]

Attendance at graduation in regalia is required at my uni (it is even in my employment contract).  However, the university rents the caps & gowns for us (in generic black).  Then when you earn tenure, it buys you your official regalia, in your Ph.D. school's colors.

[Juvenal]

But who, really, looks with a critical eye?  The audience checking with a score card to see if what you have on is truly authentic to the uni/discipline?  No one (but you?) cares.  Any regalia should do.  Unless you care.  That can count for something.  Enough?

[copykat]

Attendance at graduation in regalia is required at my uni (it is even in my employment contract).  However, the university rents the caps & gowns for us (in generic black).  Then when you earn tenure, it buys you your official regalia, in your Ph.D. school's colors.

What a nice tenure gift!

Every year I wear one of my department's loaners and I feel self-conscious because it's either the wrong degree (one year I went in the green of a medical doctor) or a strange cut (this spring I was given one that didn't zip up in the center and I felt like some weird professorial lounge-lizard). So I've been looking at those $150 options on Amazon, but if all goes well, I might get something nicer as a tenure gift for myself.