Well, I deleted a couple posts last night because I thought they were whiny and complainey.

But I will join Bess' rant about fashion.

However, for me what offends are not so much cropped pants - which look goofy but are otherwise somewhat inoffensive to my tastes - but cropped TOPS.

and the new Vogue Knits is full of 'em.

It is not simply envy. No, I do not have a 'bod' that would look good in cropped tops (actually, few people past the age of puberty do, IMHO). It's just - I don't know, maybe I'm a prude - but I tend to think of navel-revealing as something best left for the beach (and even then, I'm going to be the one there in the dark-colored maillot suit). And so many of the tops, at least in the new Vogue, look to me like the designer ran out of yarn 3" shy of where the hem should be - the tops look poorly proportioned somehow, and I think that's what offends me. (Asymmetricallity offends me too; it seems like a cheap way of avoiding measuring. Yes, I know, excessively left-brained, but that is how I am. I look at the pictures in the Sally Melville books and try to figure out how to make the asymmetrical hems on the patterns symmetrical.)

Also, many of the folk who wear the cropped tops wear them with low-slung jeans. That is just not a good look. Not even on supermodels. Not even on airbrushed pictures of supermodels. I have no desire to see another person's pelvic bones.

And trust me - if you wear lowslung jeans to lab, and then sit on a stool and lean over a microscope, the rear view is NOT pretty. I don't care how thin you are. (Just say no to "crack", giggle giggle snort giggle).

I noticed in one of the spring mags - don't remember which one; I tend to lump all such designs together in a large grey area I label "wouldn't wear" - was a low-slung sarong-type skirt. It was quite horrifying - looked like it was about to slide off the model onto the floor (one can only hope she was wearing a bikini bottom under the thing, although considering the amount of hip-al area revealed, I sort of doubt it).

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not calling for a return to the Victorian era, with corsets and floor-sweeping skirts and necklines up to the chin. But I would like to see a season where people were mostly covered up from their collarbones to their knees.