See Spot. Run and Cop These Pants.

My life sometimes feels like a high-wire act, one that requires nimbly balancing any number of competing goals and desires. I've decided that if you're gonna go through life walking a tightrope, might as well do it in style! These cranberry-colored silk polka-dot trousers ($1,250, detail, at right) from Louis Vuitton's spring/summer 2009 collection, had me seeing spots when they were first previewed last Spetember. Enough to make a girl drop the bad-news Business section of The New York Times and join the circus. And now the parachute pants are everywhere: Model Jourdan Dunn sported them in a February 2009 Vogue spread; Lindsay pairs them with a boyfriend blazer and midriff-baring tee on the cover of Nylon's April 2009 anniversary issue, and Ms. Ciccone features them in the latest LV campaign.

A Hungry Ghost

The New York Public Library hosted a reading by Kate Taylor, the editor of an anthology titled Going Hungry, which focuses on "desire, self-denial," and our shrinking appetites. On the first Monday in March, I braved a snowstorm in support of my former colleague, with whom I'd broken (low-calorie?) bread over discussions of body image and disordered eating and overeating. What distinguishes her book is that it gathers writers, authors, and journalists to address the topic and not, for example, embattled teen girls sporting red "ana" bracelets.

If ever there was a taboo subject, this would be it, and perhaps even more so in the black community, where conventional thinking has it that more is more once you step on the scale - and that the zaftig will be rewarded by longevity and male admiration. Real women have curves, right, not jutting rib cages? (At left, an image from designer Hedi Slimane's photo diary of Lindsay Lohan.) Yet increasingly I hear from chicks of colorful complexions who are anxious about their weight, staring down bottles of herbal appetite-killers and passing on dinner. In Tibetan Buddhism, the hungry ghost is depicted with a large, bloated stomach, gaping mouth, and a neck too small to pass food, a metaphor for those who can't grasp that to be full-filled is to go within. But going without, that nihilistic impulse to deny corporeal needs, ultimately just leaves you where you started...hungry.