STYLES Barely there fashions skirt tasteful boundary

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Skin is in. Or should we say out -- as in out in the open.
Placemat-size miniskirts are back on fashion runways and in stores. Dangerously low pants and bare middles linger.
Tops may be cropped so high they create a new kind of upside-down-cleavage.
"Bosom bottom bounces onto fashion front," reads a recent headline in the Arizona Republic. Young people are rushing in for belly-button cosmetic surgery.
Even in the workplace, young women casually walk about with slivers of flesh peeking out below a T-shirt. And New York supermodels wear their jeans south enough to show the top of their thong underwear.
Showing more skin
Are we reaching a new bar in the bare market?
Bare fashion "is huge," says David Wolfe, creative director of the Doneger Group, which counsels retailers. "The short skirt at Abercrombie and Fitch is blowing out of the store. It could be a belt. I sometimes think the hip bone is the new erotic zone."
Wolfe says low-rise pants still are selling well and are on fashion runways for fall. Even influential menswear designers have trimmed the top of men's pants to shocking levels.
The new news involves short skirts that began to surface in designer spring lines; in the recent round of fall shows, they multiplied with added tights and thigh-high boots.
But certainly minis are old stuff. Britain's Mary Quant, France's Andre Courreges and America's Rudi Gernreich were in lockstep on bare legs in the 1960s, the age of the pill and the sexual revolution.
Sandy Scheier, a Detroit-based film-fashion historian, recalls young designer Leo Narducci's appearance at a Detroit department store in the late '60s. When a woman asked if it was true that women should be uncovering their knees, Narducci replied, "Madame, at this point, you should be uncovering your thighs."
Link to fitness
Today's skirts, unlike the '60s, are not likely to spawn a rush to the clothing store racks. Consumers long ago stopped reacting to the dictates of the fashion industry. Nevertheless, short was strongly endorsed for fall by a wide range of designers from Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Kors to Marc Jacobs, Anne Klein and others.
Observers also think the shrinking clothes may be partly caused by today's fitness consciousness.
"People have worked very hard getting their bodies in shape. They want to show them off," says Marshal Cohen, an executive with the NPD Group, a marketing trade group.
Mandi Norwood, former editor of British Cosmopolitan and American Mademoiselle magazines, sees the look as a celebration of the female body. "Women are really having fun with fashion." They feel confident, empowered and independent.
Considering that hip-level pants should have run the course by now as trends usually go, fashion seems to be stuck. But with today's sluggish retail market, no one is surprised.
"When the economy is shaky, you are not going to see drastic changes in trends," NPD's Cohen says. "People are looking at last year's trends and thinking that will carry them for the time. Obsolescence is obsolete."
Various philosphies
In short, consumers have "lost their passion for fashion" with so many things going on in the world.
Leon Hall, the New York fashion consultant and "E Style" television commentator, is more concerned about seeing revealing clothes on unfit bodies.
"The sad part is when people who shouldn't do it, do it," he says. "We all have to look in the mirror and say 'I can't do this anymore.' I just think it's bad manners."
At the same time, Laurie Mintz, associate professor and psychologist at the University of Missouri-Columbia, takes a stronger opposing view. She sees it as a "continuing trend in the media's objectifying of women."
The message is that a woman's value is based on her body. It's part of the increasing sexualization of our culture and of women, Mintz says.
Studies show that exposure to such images tends to decrease women's self-esteem as they start seeing themselves as an object.
And in her book, "Return to Modesty," Wendy Shalit recalls times when in the presence of women in short skirts she has noticed they appear to be tugging on them and constantly asking, "Do I look OK?" because they feel vulnerable.
She argues that modesty in dress allows women the freedom not to be "hung up on sex." It permits "me to be taken seriously as a woman without being desperate about it." She can then think about other things, she writes, "Other than 'Do I look OK?"'
But Hal Rubenstein, fashion director of In Style magazine, says the issue is overblown.
"I think the media is looking to make a story," he says. "Everyone is desperate to make volatile trends."
These are conservative times, he says, and when the climate is conservative "economically and politically the level of titillation goes up."
He points to ancient vintage films where the diaphanous fabrics and body-tight gowns were a given long ago. "Think about the controversy over the sensuous gown Rita Hayworth wore in 'Gilda.'"
Scheier, who tracks film fashion, agrees. In the early days of films, she says, some Hollywood executives had roots in the New York garment district. They wanted to call attention to the clothes, so they insisted on lingerie-like, barely there costumes. Joan Crawford, for one, was often seen in see-through clothes.
The dress was destined to shift to churchgoing proper in the early 1930s when censors such as the Decency Legion emerged to police the skin scene.