Science of fashion - Exposed!

So you think it's frou-frou designers in Paris, London and Rome that are setting this autumn's fashion dictates? Think again. The hottest secret in the fashion world is who the designers are watching: the guys and gals whose idea of well-dressed is a white lab coat and loafers. Egg-heads. Scientists.

No you say. Impossible. Well science by its very nature is about pushing the frontiers of the possible in ways that make anorexic models wearing ostrich feathers and mud seem tame. It's fashions dirty little secret that designers are prowling labs for their latest runway sensations.

A case in point. This past summer at a space science conference I noted one of Canada's astronomical bright lights wearing grey wool socks and sandals. The fashion sense of the Ivory Tower, I thought. A fashion victim anywhere but in the confines of those whose eyes are fixed on the heavens, not their feet. But how wrong I was. This past weekend I glanced at the fashion pages of my newspaper and lo and behold there was a feature article trumpeting the arrival of (you guessed it) socks-and-sandals! Far from a geeky fashion faux pas my space scientist was setting the stride for those chic Euro-strutters.

Now that I've had time to reflect on this phenom, I realize that the science lab is the four-season source for fashion Eurekas. The only slightly besmudged doyenne of style herself, Miss Stewart — one with a keen nose for establishing the next must-have domestic adornment — knows the power of science chic. In an earlier issue of her eponymous magazine she exalted scientific glassware — beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, test tubes — to the level of elegant dinner ware. Would you like another 75-millilitres of grape-derived ethanol? This lab bench-to-bacchanalian switch is of course the essence of great fashion trends: take what's illicit (a la baggy prison wear and eating in the biology lab) and turn it on its head for enormous commercial gain.

For the ultimate proof of science's sway over the fashionistas we only have to recall that this is the annus miraculus of that über culture icon Albert Einstein. It was a hundred years ago that Mr. Physics scored a scientific triple crown with landmark papers that revolutionized our views of space, time and the atom.

But here’s the rub: Einstein spent the later part of his life looking for a great unifying theory in numbers and equations to explain the interaction of the universe's fundamental forces. Yet it's perhaps the man himself that represents a kind of cultural glue linking our society's archetypes of brain (scientists) and body (fashion models).

Who better than Time Magazine's Man of the 20th Century, to give gravitas to designer's love of fly-away hair and dishevelment as a form of high art. Einstein's "I've got better things to think about than appearance" is replaced with "I'm going to give the impression that I've got better things to think about than appearance."

And so, the man whose face adorns more t-shirts than any other stands not only as an emblem of a great mind, but as the revealer of the formula for high fashion — follow the geeks.