the brainy sartorialist.

In Bossypants, Tina Fey calls her marriage borderline boring. She says, “I don’t enjoy any kind of danger or volatility. I don’t have that kind of ‘I love the bad guys thing.’ No, no thank you. I like nice people.” Me too! The bad boy holds negative appeal for me. My sister’s neighbor once called her husband a “rugged nerd” in passing, and that categorization has become the buzzword in my family for the ideal guy. Rugged so that they’re athletic, handy, masculine, and nerd so that they’re smart, analytical, curious, etc. According to this chart that I came across a few days ago, these are the characteristics of a Geek instead of a Nerd, but I definitely would have flipped the titles if I’d made this little diagram.

Feel free to disagree with me in the comments, but I’ve got a pretty big dog on my side in the geek/nerd fight in the blog, The Nerd Boyfriend. On the site, Roxana Altamirano takes iconic men from real life, history, movies, and TV, and she tells you where you can buy specific items of clothing to recreate their looks. Her site is an online style guide, and it shows the chic in the geek (had to do it).

Here are some examples. If you don’t recognize all these people, their names are under the picture, and then the clothing items are collected below. If you’re on the site, you can click the item and the link will direct you to a store.

Clearly, “nerd” has a wide definition, which means there should be plenty of rugged ones running around too. Perfect!

(1, the rest)