Sandra Oh in ‘The Chair’ should be your autumn muse
The chair of an English department at a US college might not be the first character who springs to mind when we think about style muses, but the very notion has shifted in recent years. Yes, we still return again and again to romantic ideas of emulating Katharine Hepburn or Grace Kelly, but real women with real wardrobes now hold their own appeal.
As Professor Ji-yoon Kim in Netflix’s watchable new series The Chair, Sandra Oh is very much a real woman. She’s in her forties, battling a new job on the career front, a precocious adopted daughter and awkward widowed father on the home front, and a sort-of romance with a colleague which makes handling both situations all the more complicated.
With all this on her plate, she perhaps couldn’t be blamed for turning up to meetings with the Dean looking as crumpled as some of the ancient, dusty old professors she’s attempting to push into the 21st century, yet Kim’s look is simple, sleek and just collegiate enough without veering into cliché territory.
What’s especially cheering is the way that key pieces appear over and over. Like most of us, Kim relies on one great winter coat, which she wears day after day. Hers is especially charming and a departure from the current vogue for camel wrap styles. Instead, the professor prefers a timeless grey duffel as she rushes from campus to rescue her daughter from her father’s reluctant babysitting sessions.
She also has an elegant capsule wardrobe of blazers and trouser suits which, in fine corduroy and tweed, have a Prof-by-way-of-j. Crew vibe. She teams them with crew neck knitwear in Ivy League shades of ochre and fawn, sometimes with a Fair Isle pattern, or a very crisp white shirt which begins the day pristinely buttoned-up and tucked into tailored trousers and ends up undone with the sleeves rolled up wrangling with her daughter in the kitchen.
When she dresses up, Kim is of the school of thought which advocates for slipping on a statement blouse with your usual black trousers – effortless and feminine yet professional, too. As “real-life” resumes in earnest, this professor is just the woman to take lessons from in how to look effortlessly sophisticated now.