Geek Chic is the geek culture, and Geek Pride Day is a day to celebrate the geek culture. Let’s dive deep into the geek culture in this piece…
‘Geek Chic’ the geek culture:
A Fashion Trend that arose in the 2000s where Young People went Geeky by sporting Geek culture. People adopted “geek culture”, like wearing oversized black horn-rimmed glasses, suspenders/braces, and highwater trousers. The glasses, sometimes worn with non-prescription lenses or without lenses, quickly became the defining aspect of the trend, with the media identifying various celebrities like David Beckham and Justin Timberlake as “trying geek” or “going geek” for wearing such glasses. Meanwhile, in the sports world, many NBA players wore “geek glasses” during post-game interviews.
However, the geek culture ‘Geek Chic’ is matched to a particular historical trend, it can more generally mean anything geeky or nerdy, but is also cool and stylish.
Cambridge describes the geek chic- as a fashionable style of dressing that uses geeky-clothes, geeky-glasses, etc. usually thought to be boring or not fashionable.
Wait: what? Sporting a video game tattoo isn’t lame or wearing a Mario Hat that is somehow fashionable. Essentially, geek culture has become more and more mainstream with time so really, geek chic is more mainstream than it is avant-garde, though, at the time, it did stand out.
Geek Chic Facts
1961- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a few students created Spacewar! the first 2-player computer game. It had a sci-fi element- two spaceships trying to blow each other up.
1977- Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope is released. The galactic saga, whose fans now span three generations.
1980s- Devo, one of the very first geek rock bands, got a lot of airplay on an up-and-coming channel: MTV. Devo is an American rock band from Akron, Ohio formed in 1973. It had two sets of brothers, the Mothersbaughs (Mark and Bob) and the Casales (Gerald and Bob), along with Alan Myers. The band had a No. 14 Billboard chart hit in 1980 with the single “Whip It”, the song that gave the band mainstream popularity.
2001- The cinematographic adaptation of the geeks’ absolute seminal book became simultaneously a commercial success and the fall into the mainstream of a large chunk of the geek culture. Maybe not everybody can speak one of the Elvish languages constructed by J.R.R.Tolkien, but everyone would know a hobbit if they saw one.
2002- Tobey Maguire starring as nerd-turned-superhero Peter Parker, Commercial success. it’s the comic books world that now falls completely mainstream. And Hollywood sure milked that cow until … well, they never really stopped, nor do they plan to.
2009: Angry Birds take the smartphone and video gaming world by storm. The Finnish video game franchise now counts more than 1.7 billion downloads and has been called “one the most mainstream games out right now”. With digital birds being thrown at pigs in virtually all buses, metros and trains in the Western world, Angry Birds contributed to making gaming, once the exclusive territory of hardcore geeks, a mainstream culture.
As time elapsed, the world has started embracing the geek culture. Video games are more popular than ever. Technology like iPhone, Facebook and Xbox 360’s Kinect become the most talked about topic in social circles. All of us await eagerly on the next technological innovation to be out and be the first to play on it. And all of that merely happened in a span of a few decades.
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