This week's proscription

Maybe this is an east/west coast "culture tastemaker" thingie at work, but ever since late winter we've been noticing a preponderance of young women opting to pair the slimming bermuda short with a knee-high boot of some sort, creating an odd couture chimaera; a veritable fashion cyborg, if you will (artist rendering, right).

What is going on here? Shorts in the winter was strange enough -- anyone care about air temperature anymore? But now that the weather has turned, this hideous hybrid has become a sort of de facto formalwear -- the split-leg of the pant with the above-the-knee brevity of a skirt! "Just let me toss some boots on to totally defeat the purpose of wearing short pants and, voila! I now look ridiculous, with only my knee joints exposed. Awesome!"

It takes months for these things to occur to me, because once you see the weirdest clothing combination you can imagine, it's only a matter of seconds before there's someone else coming up the avenue aping the first.

In that vein, "Coming up next: Why did anyone decide to unearth the hoary footless-tight from 1987 and pair it with denim jean shorts? That and more, after the break."