This is it. This is Freshers’ Week. You’ve had one last drunken summer frolic around your hometown fields with Despacito pumping on your iPhone, and you’ve done the whole pinky promise with your BFFLs that you’ll totally stay in touch forever. Now you’re teetering beside three suitcases which contain the entire contents of your childhood bedroom, minus your 1D poster because, well, you’re quite keen on making at least one friend at uni. Your mum and dad are parked up in the driveway and you take one last look in your dusty mirror.
Is this it? Is this the outfit that will subconsciously signal to like minded souls that you are one of them, the get up that ensures your people get you. Like job interviews and Tinder dates, first impressions are everything. But piecing together the perfect outfit can be daunting, so we’ve done it for you. Fresh from the LFW spring/summer 18 catwalks, here are five looks to wear this Freshers’ Week — and what each one says about you.*
The Radical Clit Lit Feminist
By day, she’s holed up in her specifically requested Oxbridge turret dorm with her personal library of Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir and anthologies of inspirational Tumblr quotes. By night, she’ll be furiously editing her radical feminist zine, Town and Cuntry. She’s not here to make friends, in fact the only time she’ll talk to you is to lecture you on the vexatious effects of Kindle on the publishing industry and how best to ameliorate the situation.
Get the look!
Channel your inner Bloomsbury group babe by donning a long flowing number from Erdem. Adorn your walls with framed pictures of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. Write all your essays on an antique typewriter.
The Jean Luc GODard Disciple
She bowls into every class 25 minutes late in a tornado of loose papers and forgotten books. She’s majoring in film, duh, so anything physical that exists outside of a screen is beyond her. But who needs the real world when you have the abstract subjective realism of iconoclastic French New Wave cinema, n’est-ce pas?
She lives off campus in an abandoned art warehouse where she screens 35mm films of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests on loop. Secretly her favourite film is Bridesmaids but she’d sooner down 8 Dirty Vimto’s and run naked around the quad than tell anyone.
Get the look!
The generic film buff black beret/tight turtleneck combo is totally passé. Instead, this chic and serious lass swaps it for a leather skirt suit and some blacked out shades.You can’t sit with her.
The Vodka Lime Socialist
A die-hard history of art student and sworn enemy of capitalism, she’s the talk of campus ever since she crashed one of the rugby team’s pub crawls to circulate flyers for her Bauhaus tribute club night. Outside of lectures she divides her time between trolling alt-right YouTubers with satanic imagery and grammar corrections, and rubbing shoulders with toffs on the drinking society circuit. Like all anarchists, she is very partial to a free bar.
Get the look!
Dilara Findikoglu’s show was a captivating ode to the occult, and set a great example of how to mess with messed up alt-righters. If you can’t invest in her best just yet, rip up and repurpose your old tartan uniform and draw some pentagrams on your face.
The #Art Student.
She doesn’t say much — or rather, anything — for the entire first week. She lives, breathes and shits art, and plans on dedicating her life to tearing down the sexist ‘sanctity’ of the gallery by turning the world (read: the junior common room) into her canvas. She even covered all the bathroom mirrors in her halls with black permanent marker as a politically charged statement against selfies.
Get the look!
MM6 Maison Margiela’s presentation was an education in body art — the good kind. If you can’t quite afford it (and you can’t, you’re an art student) just grab a bed sheet and a Sharpie and call it a day.
The Uni Till I Die kid
This girl will be your lifesaver during Freshers’. She’s got glitter and glow sticks galore, and she knows how make a mean toga out of a bedsheet which, trust me, you’ll thank her for when the dreaded Greeks and Romans themed bop rolls around. Two weeks and 1000 meticulously tagged Facebook party pics later, you realise that this girl’s enthusiasm applies to student groups too — whatever, wherever, whoever. She’ll be the one taking minutes and handing out homemade flyers for the Crochet Tea Cosy Club. You’ll spend the next few months avoiding her.
Get the look!
Pam Hogg’s hypercolour-filled collection is sure to get you noticed at any college bop. BYO neon face paint.
* All to be taken with the same pinch of salt you’ll soon be licking off a sweaty hand as you slurp tequila shots out of a frat boy’s bellybutton.