• The Arms Race
  Why are fashion designers suddenly obsessed with sleeves?
  Josh Patner
  posted June 20, 2008
• Fashion Roadkill
  When did Carrie Bradshaw become a label whore?
  Julia Turner
  posted May 29, 2008
• Oscar Fashion Report Card
  Why so many black dresses? And which ones were best?
  Amanda Fortini
  posted Feb. 25, 2008
• Vanguard Is the New Edgy
  Cocktail Chatter: How to fake your way through Fashion Week.
  Josh Patner
  posted Feb. 1, 2008
• Lolita's Closet
  Unbearably trampy back-to-school clothes.
  Emily Yoffe
  posted Aug. 24, 2007
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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.

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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