Fashion's Fascination with Collegiate Chaos

Paul Smith's 2011 Fall collection is rife with mismatched suiting and disheveled, bespectacled tweed. Perhaps the fashion industry has been besotted with the clothing of an Oxford all-nighter for some time, the distasteful term "Geek Chic" is certainly nothing new, and black framed "Buddy Holly" glasses are less than cutting edge. However a certain take on youthful academia, collegiate disorder, sullied, or compromised formality, rumpled classicism seems to be emerging on the runways of the world, promulgating an ethos distinct from the pop-heavy "Geek Chic" of the past. Oddly the horn-rims of 2005 suggested a sort of facile individuality, the outsider identity of all youth. Perhaps "Geek Chic" encompassed a vague acceptance of the pathos of the over twenty gamer and a feeble nose-thumbing in the direction of big business and general adulthood, but ideology was vestigial to the movement and seems to have been all but shed. However the harried-college-student-circa-1930 does seem to hold some more cohesive if not more sophisticated Weltanschauung. One which celebrates intellectualism, granted, of a particularly elegant, adolescent sort. It lays claim to a far less accessible identity than that of generic individuality, it is an outward expression of thought as a stance, a stance that miserably few of us can hold.Slideshow of Paul Smith 2011 Fall