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Friday, October 15, 2004

Oh, God, Yes!
Posted by Jill | 11:14 AM

OK, so this isn't about politics. But I'm still glad that SOMEONE has had the courage to state the obvious: that the last thing we needed to make a fashion comeback is the poncho.

Fashion crimes, like many other crimes, begin innocently enough. A few influential designers send a quirky and impractical article of clothing down the runway; high-fashion magazines enthusiastically push it; a celebrity is photographed wearing it; lower-end lines begin mass-producing it; suddenly, women are buying it in shrieking colors and synthetic fabrics, and what started as a harmless act of whimsy has become a widespread aesthetic offense. So it has gone with the poncho—that rectangular piece of material resembling a small blanket, with a hole in the center for your head. The style, now at its apogee, appears both in mainstream stores like Ann Taylor, the Gap, J.C. Penney, and Macy's (which offers 43 options in a ponchos-only department) and in high fashion magazines like Vogue, in which New York socialite Plum Sykes sports a fringed, yellow, off-the-shoulder number, and Bazaar, where a $1,500 Chloe "horse blanket poncho" is deemed one of the season's "must-haves." Recently, during a 20-minute walk in Midtown Manhattan, I counted 18 ponchos—averaging nearly one per minute. Ponchos have become this season's Ugg boots: unsightly and overexposed.


I used to wear a poncho. I was fifteen, sort of overweight (though not as much as I remember being), and wearing a poncho all the time, combined with keeping my head downcast so that my either limp or frizzy hair, depending on the day, covered as much of my face as possible, allowed me to delude myself that I was invisible to the world.

My poncho was pretty cool as ponchos go; it was more Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly than Granny's Old Crocheting. But I wasn't Clint Eastwood, I was just another depressed adolescent, and it looked awful. And time has not been kind to ponchos either. Yes, we can rejoice that the era of hip-huggers exposing pierced bellies may be ending, but I'm not convinced that the poncho is an improvement.
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