Dispatches From Fashion Week

If you believe the New York Post—often quite a fun exercise—then the brightest idea of Fashion Week's first day was a roomy pair of floral-print overall shorts that the Brazilian beachwear line Cia.Marítima offered as a beach wrap: "So cute! So genius!" To put the idea in its proper context, the Post illustrated this morning's piece on yesterday's action with an image of what the cover-up might cover—the little bum of a Czechwoman named Karolina Kurkova, which sat snug in an "Afrikaans-print" bikini bottom, a long ride down an arched back from her honeyed hair and plump smirk. The whole thing made for a pulse-quickening picture.

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And yet, strutting the runway in that very get-up at yesterday's 2 p.m. show, Kurkova and her colleagues were a vision of anti-eroticism. Though I found it no hardship to watch attractive women file around in bathing suits, I did not find it hot. Under the display lights of Cia.Marítima's catwalk and the trade-show gaze of the assembled, a pretty girl wearing a bikini was not a pretty girl wearing a bikini. She was something like a strikingly constructed humanoid in a white crossed top, made in 83.5 percent polyamide, 16.5 percent spandex, and low-rise tricot scoop bottom (made with metallic golden thread). Or let me put in this way: While making us wait for the show to start—and we will come to see that waiting is as central to the routine of the fashion reporter as it is to the life of the heroin addict—our hosts played a terribly trumpet-heavy version of "The Girl from Ipanema" over the tent's sound system. As beautiful as the song is, this rendition was too brassy to provoke excitement.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

Photograph of model on Slate's home page by Mark Mainz/Getty. Photograph of Paris Hilton impersonator Natalie Reid by TP2/ARB/WENN Photos. Photograph of the Diane von Furstenberg show by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for IMG. Photograph of Paris and Nicky Hilton at the Heatherette show by Mark Mainz/Getty Images for IMG. Photograph of model on Slate's home page by Mark Mainz/Getty. Photograph of Project Runway host Heidi Klum on Slate's home page by Mark Mainz/Getty Images For IMG.

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