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Betabrand, the San Francisco-based online clothing community best-known for sweatpants that look like dress pants, recently debuted a spring collection featuring female models who have PhDs or are PhD candidates.
“When you look beyond the ranks of the professionally beautiful, photography becomes a lot more fun,” Betabrand founder Chris Lindland said in a statement, according to AdWeek. “Our designers cooked up a collection of smart fashions for spring, so why not display them on the bodies of women with really big brains?”
On the one hand, the promotion is an empowering statement, especially for STEM advocates, considering most of the models have or are pursuing PhDs in science and engineering. On the other hand, the women all have the same thin body type and are beautiful by conventional standards, so is it really a revolutionary campaign?
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Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com