Fashion: Problems in Pants

Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants; ; Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.

You look divine as you advance — Have you seen yourself retreating?

Ogden Nash wrote those lines in the 1930s, when people still looked up every time an airplane flew over, and a woman who wore pants was either an actress or an athlete. He could hardly have foreseen the day when, at high noon, two out of every five women passing the entrance of Henri Bendel's in Manhattan would be dressed in trousers. The fact that women's pants are...