Fashion: the highs and lows

I am just not sure the new high waist for Spring is flattering. I mean, if it doesn't look good on Mischa or Jessica, then whom?




















Of course, I felt exactly the same way when low riders came out. I thought they were so ugly and I'd never wear them. Soon enough, my whole dresser was full of them. I'm really not an "innovator," more like an "early adopter." Of course, by the time I'm able to partake in retail therapy everyone in America will have a pair of these.

Speaking of low riders, I had never heard this one before, so in case you haven't either, I'll pass on a funny term a friend clued me into. We've all seen those poor teenage girls shamelessly walking around literally spilling over their jeans. They haven't yet learned that not all trends will work on every body type. You have to pick and choose, girls. Well, now when you see those poor misguided fashion victims, I defy you to not remember this perfect description for the overflow: muffin tops.Here is how I know I am woefully behind the curve on this one. William Safire wrote a column on "Muffin Tops" in 2005. Where have I been!?

August 28, 2005

Muffin-Top

By WILLIAM SAFIRE

The fashion world is a fecund, fruitful and fertile source of metaphoric phrases. (Funny, that all these synonyms for ''productive'' begin with f.) In 1999, an outbreak of bare midsections in the fashion world led this department to a midriff riff: I expressed my preference for the informal term bellybutton to be written as a single word, on the analogy of bellyache; this stand was opposed by a legion of navel-gazers who preferred a two-word usage, on the analogy of belly dancer. The dispute has never been resolved.

We now turn to a related locution spawned by the sight of as much as three to six inches of stomach bulging out below a short blouse and above hip-clinging ''low-rise'' jeans.

When the wearer's abdomen is flat, a display of flesh above and well below the bellybutton produces an eye-catching picture of what The Scotsman in Britain has called ''the Britney belly-flash.'' However, when the wearer's midriff is flabby, a vivid culinary metaphor is used: muffin-top. As every baker knows, a muffin is a small cake that rises above its metal container. When removed from the pan, its shape is round, with the top hanging over the base of the cake like a small, harmless mushroom cloud.

''Muffin-Top Mayhem!'' was the headline in The New York Daily News this summer, atop a picture of a woman whose midriff was overhanging her belt. The unfortunate loser of this battle of the bulge was said by the writer, Mark Ellwood, to be called a muffin-top. He defined the display as ''the unsightly roll of flesh that spills over the waist of a pair of too-tight pants.'' The locution is not sexist: a male actor, usually characterized as a ''screen hunk,'' photographed in such a state is called a stud-muffin-top. (I am indebted to Ann Wort of Washington for this citation.)

Rarely can slang lexicographers find ''first use'' of such a phrase, but blogging helps: coinage is claimed by a Netizen named Dyske Suematsu, who proudly informs the Internet set of having sent the compound noun to www.pseudodictionary.com in May 2003.

Anatomically, muffin-top fills a lexical void. Nearest to a synonym (with over 150,000 Google hits) is love handles, a jocularly euphemistic neologism of the late 60's, defined in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang as ''a bulge of fat at the side of the waist.'' But the love handles (usually plural) are exclusively on or above the hips; the muffin-top describes the roll of excess flesh spilling out primarily in front but possibly all around.