We don’t think of Jane Goodall as a style icon. But we should.
Style is about having a keen awareness of and control over how the world sees you, and about understanding how you see the world — how to notice and respond to all its tiny details. Dr. Goodall, who died this week at 91, was a master at this.
Dr. Goodall grasped the vast power that lay in careful, mutual observation: She sat patiently for months in the rainforest of Tanzania, observing the chimpanzees, who initially fled from her in fear. Undeterred, she kept watching, aware that the chimps were watching her, too. Eventually she gained their trust and immersed herself in their society, engaging in a kind of dialogue with them. This method of intense observation and respect led to Dr. Goodall’s simple yet revolutionary discoveries: that “animals, like us, have personalities, minds and emotions,” and that human beings were not the “highlight of creation” — which had been settled wisdom for centuries — but “an animal like the others.”
This work brought Dr. Goodall enduring celebrity, landing her on the cover of National Geographic in 1965, where, at 31, she appeared in what would become her signature look: blond hair pulled back in a low ponytail, notebook on her knees, and a uniform-like outfit of khaki button-down and shorts. In the photo, she sits, bare legs bent up toward her chest, gazing with a warm, engaged smile not at the camera, but at a group of chimpanzees in the foreground. The message was clear: “Don’t look at me. Look at them.”
She was modeling, that is, how to look, how to attend to the natural world. She was using her own style to reveal the hidden lives of animals, to reveal that they, too, had style: individuality, identities, quirks and foibles.
Dr. Goodall had inaugurated a new kind of intellectual glamour. She was the photogenic anthropologist. But fame came with both benefits and pitfalls. While her allure attracted research funding, it also garnered belittling, sexist critique. As she explained to Alex Cooper on the podcast “Call Her Daddy”: “Some of the jealous male scientists would say, ‘Well, you know, she’s just got this notoriety, and she’s getting money from Geographic. And they want her on the cover, and they wouldn’t put her on the cover if she didn’t have nice legs.’ So if somebody said that today, they’d be sued, right?”
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The post Jane Goodall Taught You How to ‘Look’ appeared first on New York Times.
