By Kyle Smith
Cute young women get away with a lot. And well they should. They brighten up a room, a subway car, a restaurant, this city. And their cuteness has an expiration date. Why shouldn’t they make every sidewalk a runway during the 25 percent of their lives when they can cause rubbernecking delays on Madison Avenue? It’s a public service that’s all the more vital in this sad, soggy Irish summer.
Instead, a fashion cloud has moved in right alongside the real ones: the maxi dress. These are tarpaulin-sized pieces of cloth — floor-trailing, form-obliterating, ayatollah-pleasing schmattes — swathing the (reportedly) lithe forms of New York’s comeliest women. See them marching grimly down the avenues, trying to avoid getting tripped up by a drag coefficient like that of a deflated parachute.
Even Victoria’s Secret sells maxi dresses. Who knew Victoria was so Victorian? Cancel my subscription to the catalog, please.
There are eight million people in this decreasingly naked city. So there must be . . . oh, say, at least 250,000 straight men left. Speaking for the neglected minority at a time of withering morale, I humbly petition New York’s hot women, during the few (if any) weeks of warm weather we have left: Burn your maxi dresses. Bury the ashes with Bea Arthur. Go back to the flirty short skirts and tank tops you’ve been wearing every summer, with vast success.
One of the most puzzling things about women, to a guy, is that you buy magazines that tell you how to look and then feel duty-bound to comply. But magazines are slaves to advertisers, and advertisers want this year’s look to be as far from last year’s as possible so you’ll look out of style if you don’t buy the new stuff. The endpoint? The muumuu that says “Moo moo,” Liza Minnelli’s revenge — the urban burqa.
It is said that women dress for other women, but where is it written that women must dress for the Taliban? If there is one abiding message we have been trying to send by making things go boom in Afghanistan for the last eight years, it is this: America has a profound moral obligation to advance a society in which women have the right to vote, get an education and be smoking hot babes. I’m talking about the kind of woman who makes men use the wrong subway exit just so we can keep gazing helplessly for another 10 seconds.
A maxi dress — yes, the name itself has un-sexy connotations traceable to the Feminine Euphemisms aisle of the grocery store — makes a heavy woman into a mountain. It makes a slender woman look like a tent in search of a campground. What is the point of spending hours at the gym if you’re going to dress like Elaine Stritch?
Similar worrying trends — “boyfriend” shorts, shirts and sweaters — all point in the same direction of loose, shapeless ugliness. Let me tell you something: Your boyfriend doesn’t want to have to use a GPS system to locate you under that bedsheet you’re wearing. He wants you to make his friends jealous.
Perhaps, New York woman, you are thinking: But these dresses are so comfy! Here’s a trend that allows me to take a summer off-duty! Yes, I will have another slice of pie!
Please. Do not turn our island into Manhattastan. Or Topeka. This place is about competition, not comfort. It’s an overcrowded little club for the best, the cleverest, the most stylish. It seethes with neurotic excellence. If you can’t handle the pressure, the Lincoln Tunnel is right there. It’ll be parka season soon enough. You’ll be 50 soon enough.
BY Raakhee Mirchandani
Kyle, you ignorant slut. You say my “cuteness” has expired?
Having crossed the 25 percent mile marker of my life — the one that means I am no longer alluring and unable to elicit double takes and whiplash — I suppose I should now retreat into a dotage spent lamenting my lost youth, now squandered by wearing maxi dresses.
My favorite dress — the maxi, of which I have at least 50 — is under fire for taking the heat out of summer. Meek, middle-aged men are losing hair over the lack of flesh on display this summer.
Guys want mini — the teeny, tiny figure-revealing skirts and dresses that are all leg, all the time.
I want maxi — and to meet men who can handle a girl in a long dress and realize how bad-ass she is, not giving an A-line about what you think. Or at least come across a few who won’t catcall, openly ogle or mentally undress me upon glimpsing a little thigh.
But you can’t stop yourselves. You’re pigs.
This is something you guys might understand better when your daughters grow out of diapers and into mini skirts.
Let me explain the maxi dress: It’s graceful, comfortable, gorgeously crafted, elegant and allows for a certain amount of anonymity. It’s not a fashion jail sentence or what women are condemned to wear when they hit ever-so-undesirable 50. I live in my strapless, aqua, leopard-print Nanette Lepore maxi dress.
Keeping the goods under wraps is sometimes a necessity. There’s nothing more dehumanizing or infuriating than leering, flesh-hungry men. And few more tragic. They stare so hard we feel naked, especially when they loudly wax poetic about our bangin’ assets.
They’re real and they’re spectacular. We know. Get over it.
I’ve discussed boors like you at our hot-girl conventions — organized sleepovers where we give each other facials, braid hair and wage competitive pillow wars in lacy panties — and baby, you’re never happening. I’ve been a girl for almost 28 years and nobody I know has ever turned around, made eye contact with her street suitor and fallen madly in love.
And they never will.
You see, we don’t dress for you. And we never have.
I imagine, New York men, what you are thinking of us girls in the maxi dresses: “You are just getting fat under there!” “Don’t eat another cupcake!” “Don’t let yourself go!”
As if. We stay hot for ourselves.
If the maxi dress makes you limp, here’s a fall trend your simple minds will melt over — jumpsuits. You can’t see in, you can’t get in. It’s invitation-only.
And you’re not on the list.