Lileks has thoughts on the never-ending attempts of the fops in Paris to foist retro fashions on us. It will probably go on until the last baby boomer has retired from the fashion industry (including fashion sections of newspapers).

Also, this:

In related fashion news: on this day in 1946, the bikini was introduced, a swmsuit named after an atomized Pacific atoll. Good thing they didn’t test the bomb on the Spratly Atoll, because no one would want to wear a Spratly. It sounds like an amusing way to fall down. The original bikini seems modest today – the bottom was about an inch below the sternum, hiked up like an old man’s pants – but it had the scandalous effect its designers intended. It’s interesting to consider that the modern bikini cannot get any smaller; you can find website that will sell postage stamps held together by strands one micron thick. It’s perhaps the sole area of human endeavor in which additional development is impossible.

Have bikinis become so revealing that we're better off with no bikini atoll?

Groan.

Why not go pollute The Buzz with that, instead of my site?

It could have been worse.

The island was known by a different name, one given it by the European who discovered it.

Can you imagine young women wearing an "eschscholtz"?

Rand, you have to expect fallout from that story.

Of course there is room for further development. I envision a new clear bikini.

Funny comments from bottom to top. Especially Triticale's, that tickled me to pieces.

Thanks for the encouragement, Jay. I was ready to put a halter to this.

Lileks is wrong, though. He's confusing the "two piece," which was already common in Europe in the 1930s and came to American beaches in the pre-war 1940s, with the bikini that debuted in France in 1946, which had the first bottom held together with strings, and nothing anywhere near anyone's sternum.

See also: http://www.slate.com/id/2145070/