Ithaca may be more than 200 miles from the fashion hub of New York City, but it has its own fashion savvy, with such subcultures as "American princesses," "hipsters" and "neohippies," each with its own style.

That's according to Van Dyk Lewis, assistant professor of textiles and apparel at Cornell, who, with a group of undergraduates, conducted an ethnographic study -- a descriptive technique used to study cultures -- to explore how people put clothes and accessories together in this small, upstate New York outpost.

"This ethnography looks at the way people, who due to their geographic location are considered to be literally off the fashion map, contribute meaning and substance to the fashion system," says the research paper that Van Dyk just completed with two of the students on the project, Denise Green and Allison Conti.

Fashion designers, he says, have to understand anthropological and ethnographic factors in society to accurately predict fashion trends. This kind of field work is getting more important in apparel design, he said, pointing out that Abercrombie and Fitch, for example, visits campuses to photograph students as they research their next line of clothing.

For their ethnography, the Cornell researchers focused on five subgroups they identified in Ithaca:

The hipsters, Van Dyk said, turned out to be the most interesting group: "The American princesses parody celebrities they admire," he said. They mimic such trends from popular fashion magazines as oversized sunglasses, "while hipster men, their whole existence was about parodies. Hipster men wear very large women's sunglasses as a direct parody of the American princesses."

Fashion in Ithaca is very group specific, the researchers concluded. The city's isolation, they write, contributes to "Ithaca's apparent time quake, as new trends and fashions come to the city via students rather than businesses. Most importantly, Ithaca's naturally occurring geographic boundaries (downtown separated from campus by big hills) directly contribute to, reinforce and influence the development of segregated groups."

Many of the subcultures have little to do with each other; for example, the hip-hops have little contact with women cross-dressers or American princesses, but "they are bound by the fetishization of particular apparel products," write the researchers.

"We were looking at geography, whether fashion existed here, what fashion is, how groups are different and how fashion comes to Ithaca. People tend to live in territories, and some groups do not overlap," said Van Dyk, noting that fashion is a product of the life that it surrounds. He studies the dynamics of fashion trends -- how they originate, how long they last and how they fade.

"Very few undergraduates are actually in the field and doing ethnographies," wrote co-author Green, a junior majoring in textiles and apparel in the College of Human Ecology, in an e-mail from London where she is studying anthropology and fine art at Goldsmiths College, University of London, this semester. "Our ethnography of fashioned youth subcultures is unique because the culture is foremost studied and understood through their presented visual expressions. ... The experience was unusual in the best of ways."