“When you’re in a band, you’re doing something different. You’re doing this big, weird performance art. It’s silly to say you don’t care about what kind of clothes you wear. Everyone thinks about what they wear.”

So says Erza Koenig, esoteric frontman of bookish Ivy League graduates Vampire Weekend who play their only English club date this year in Brighton tonight, and who single-handedly brought preppy dressing and deck shoes back into fashion.

“I like how Ralph Lauren creates a mystical world through his clothing,” says Koenig. “A film-maker has [the benefit of] a camera, but a designer has to get you to buy into their world using just a pattern or a certain cut.

“Obviously a Louis Vuitton bag is a straight-up crass status symbol, so it depends who you’re talking about. Some designers manage to craft this whole weird world and that’s fascinating to me.”

Koeing might be erudite when it comes to fashion but it was his band’s status as ex-students at New York’s Columbia University – a sprawling campus in upper Manhattan feted as one of the world’s finest learning institutes – which really set them apart when they first broke into the mainstream with their 2008 debut.

That eponymous album, which will form the basis of tonight’s warm-up for the Reading and Leeds festivals this weekend, was lauded by all in the music business and soon went gold in the UK by selling more than 100,000 copies within a few months of its release.

The band’s rare allure was summed up by Peter Gabriel, a man not unfamiliar with unusual app-roaches, who they name-checked in an Afro-fusion number called Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa. “They have a unique style,” Gabriel told Q magazine. “It’s very exciting for them to introduce African influences to a whole new audience. They do it with intelligence and enthusiasm. And a sense of humour.”

Not many bands can combine African reggae with English chamber music – The Kids Don’t Stand A Chance is about how preppy fashion is inextricably linked with colonialism and Middle Eastern fabrics – or write odes to architecture (Mansard Roof) and the fineries of grammar use (Oxford Comma) without sounding patronising.

Vampire Weekend are proud of their educational heritage, despite indie music’s often inverted snobbery. “It’s important to be open,” says Koenig, “and besides, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

It was George Orwell, another academic obsessed with avoiding pretence, who wrote all good writers avoid cliches, and Koenig’s lyrics, full of playful references that have seen fan forums filled with debates about their meaning, are littered with original observations on student life and highbrow trivia.

“We always had an understanding we would make music by certain rules,” says Koenig. “One of them is avoiding cliches, which I don’t think anybody can entirely. But it’s very important we start from that base.

“I think our music reflects what New York is like now, which is not really that gritty. These days no part of Manhattan really has the same vibe I get from a Ramones’ song or a Velvet Underground song. But there are still things to talk about.”

Support comes from The xx.

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