Intellectual Defenestration

"There's very little left to show anyway. Everything has been revealed."

USA Today: It's the great Hollywood cover-up!:

Designers and retailers are trotting out clothes that are full-skirted and buttoned up ? downright matronly compared with Jackson's tear-away bustier. And the public, including celebrities, is following suit, trading in tiny, torso-taunting togs for tweedy Chanel (or Chanel-esque) suits and billowing, booty-shrouding dresses...

The skin-tight, skin-baring look is going away "simply because it's dull," says In Style fashion director Hal Rubenstein.

"It really has begun to look tired," says Paul Raffin, president of Express. The company used to push something called the Bikini jean, which scarcely accommodated bikini underwear. These days, jeans are all but absent from the fall line, which focuses on trim, polished pantsuits.

Given the work of 20th century feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir who argued that the part of the plight of women was because men defined women's essence, the recent tendency for women to define themselves as male sexual fantasies has just seemed horribly ironic. Hopefully, this trend is dying.

(via Dean Abbott)

April 27, 2004 01:14 PM