Fall Fashion Week always begins with the unabashedly cheesy — and thus delightful and star-studded — Heart Truth Red Dress Show, in which famous folks don clothes designed by bigwigs and do their best runway saunters. It’s a relaxing way to kick off a hellish week, which is why we’re crushed we couldn’t make it this season thanks to a 14-hour travel odyssey and some high winds in New York that kept us trapped in LAX for too many hours. We missed Lynda Carter — Wonder Woman, for all you fetuses out there — and Jennie Garth! AND Tori Spelling! And Cicely Tyson wearing some serious sleeves!
We also missed this:

We had a LOT of e-mails about this dress waiting for us when our day ended, and we agree it’s deeply problematic. Not that she is unaccustomed to wearing tiny Mariah-like — or Mariah-lite, if you will — skirts, but this one is particularly microscopic. If you stapled it at the crotch, it’s instant Betty Boop. In some circles it might even count as underwear.
To be fair to Amanda, though, she’s not necessarily wearing this by choice — Swarovski designed the dress specifically for the Heart Truth show, and although I am sure the companies know in advance what celebrity they’re getting (so that, say, Liza Minnelli doesn’t show up on the day-of and find out she’s wearing a loincloth while Hilary Duff is in a caftan, or something), it’s hard to say whether Amanda would’ve had any input at all in the final product. Clearly whoever did failed to consider that she might be strutting down a slightly raised runway, thereby giving the entire first row, and maybe more, a rather stark Vision of Love.
That same person ALSO probably didn’t count on the belt looking like a giant bejewelled pretzel. Then again, maybe the person was hungry, and at the same time assumed nobody who attends Fashion Week would even know what a pretzel LOOKS like to make the comparison.
** Oh, Amanda. Since we wrote this, E! News reported that she did indeed have a hand in creating the dress. Well, Amanda, we tried. We really tried. You’re on your own now, kid.
Here’s a look at the shows we DID get to catch on Friday:
We’ll be posting updates all week, plus regular fuggings — and rest assured, we’ll catch up on what we missed in the last two days, plus whatever comes down the pike this week. But if we’re slower than usual, please bear with us — it’s just because we’re stuck somewhere trying to flag down a cab and having the worst taxi karma imaginable. We aren’t sure what we did to a cab driver in a past life, but it must have been hellacious. Maybe one of them designed Amanda Bynes’ dress while he moonlighted at Swarovski, and Friday we simply paid the cosmic price in advance