Never saw this coming. A few weeks ago, The Huffington Post placed the University of Arizona at the head of the class as one of the best-dressed colleges in the country, right up there with the likes of NYU and Rhode Island School of Design.
Surprised? You're not alone. But it's right there in black and white ... and shades of blue, green and gray.
Our place in the online rankings - so far, the online voters have ranked our entry No. 1 - features two Wildcats who apparently have burned their flip-flops and shorts.
To the photo: With his skinny jeans, and her scarf/skirt combo, our featured fashionistas have managed to express an artful air of urban casualness, which is accented by their hipster hats. She has a hint of thrift-store eccentricity and rule breaking (white shoes with black patterned hose, a traditional no-no!). In his metered shades of gray and black, he expresses an artsy sensitivity. No smothering here.
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They have even worn shoes, which could mean they are foreign-exchange students.
"Beautiful weather. Beautiful scenery. And, as one student reviewer contends, beautiful, beautifully dressed people," the slide show says. "We think this may be one of the most aesthetically pleasing campuses around."
Well done, fashionistas - even if Parents Day was the only time you actually wore those outfits.
As life goes these days, news about the student body's dedication to fashion has been met with mixed reactions and some controversy.
There is praise: "I think they deserve the title, and I am proud of it," Pima County Supervisor Ray Carroll, always a sharp-dressed man, said to me.
Sugar Ray, who owns a women's clothing boutique, said the clothing on campus reflected a "casual-but-interested-in-learning" look.
He then encouraged the male students to shine their shoes.
"If he takes care of his shoes, you know he is taking care of the entire wardrobe," he said.
But the ranking also has stirred an I-can't-quite-articulate-it shock:
"I guess, I, um, I am surprised," said Marcia Klipsch, interim director of the UA's Lundgren Center for Retailing.
While not a fashionista, Klipsch has a keen eye for the current campus clothing trends, which appear to involve shorts and lots of skin. Usually it is shorts and flip-flops, she said, but sometimes women wear shorts and high heels or shorts and boots or shorts with boots that have high heels. Klipsch observed that combining UGGs, which are like wooly boots, with shorts was an "amusing" trend.
She noted there is quite a bit of skin on campus, which is "in some ways very feminine, and in other ways quite revealing." But less can be more, or so they say.
To get a sense of the scene, I went searching Friday morning for similarly dedicated followers of fashion on campus. Admittedly, early Friday morning in July is not the best time to find students. Maybe that's why I kept running into grad students, who seemed more interested in research.
"I'd be mostly curious to find out what they based this on because looking around I would say that most people don't try," said Alex Miles, who is pursuing a doctorate in optical sciences.
He seemed like the perfect guy to talk fashion.
Miles, 23, was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans.
Optical science students dressed OK, he said. Not like the other UA students with their predictable shorts and flip-flops.
Then, he noted his shoes. As in, he was wearing a pair (he works in a lab, which requires it).
How did he choose his outfit?
"Whatever comes out of the closet and is clean," he said.
That's the spirit! Just go with it. Flow like a chiffon scarf in a summer breeze.
The real moral of this fashionable story is that we in the media like to use bizarro rankings to get clicks, which will help sell ads. This is a new model for news in the Internet age (until there is no more news in the Internet age).
So to do my part, I have proposed the following No. 1 rankings to keep Tucson fashionable:
• Best saguaro fruit harvesting.
• Most great Mexican restaurants on a per-capita basis (thank you Barb Tanzillo!).
• Most golf courses when compared to assured water supply.
• Best javelinas.
• Best place for rain to fall.
On your marks. Get set. Click.
Dear readers of Thursday's column, a velodrome is a bike track. Mea Culpa, which means "my fault" in Latin. Contact Josh Brodesky at jbrodesky@azstarnet.com or 573-4242.
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