Haute couture, graduate-student style

East met West in my attire today. Spurning my usual engineering-graduate-student garb of grubby jeans and a white T-shirt (typically obtained for free at some point during my collegiate career) for something more formal, and more appropriate for the American Helicopter Society dinner meeting that I'm attending tonight, I stepped out of the house nattily dressed in a Nehru jacket, trench coat and cowboy hat.

Yes, you read that right. Nehru jacket. Cowboy hat. Oh, and a tie elegantly patterned with a flotilla of little B-52s.

The Nehru jacket because I wanted to try something different from my usual double-breasted blazer --- and lo and behold, it actually did look pretty damn good! The trench coat because my winter jacket is a bit too technical-looking for a formal dinner event (and also because it's fun to wear something I've never worn before). And, topping it all (ha ha!), the Western broad-brim because it's winter, and it's cold, and I need to keep my mostly keratin-free noggin warm somehow, and a woolly touk (`beanie', or `winter hat' for anyone not Canadian) would have been just waaay too incongruous with the rest of my attire. So, in the absence of any other formal-looking hat (maybe I should get myself one. And some leather gloves too, while I'm about it.), my very warm --- 100% wool --- and very stylish cowboy hat it had to be.

I'm quite stoked about it --- am grinning away idiotically just thinking about it, and the reactions of people who encountered me on my way to work. Dressing up is fun! And, if you're going to try out something bizarre, a college campus is the best place to do it. I'm never going to be able to walk around with one side of my face clean-shaven and other side with a week's growth of facial hair again, once I get a real job. *sigh*

;)