One failsafe spring style that I’m just now catching on to is what I’m going to clumsily call the “I wintered someplace warm and now I’m back just as it’s no longer butt-clenchingly cold” look. Open any magazine that costs more than five dollars and if at least a third of its pages advertise something you’ll see this look throughout the book. (The image of the dude on the right is from the new spring Calvin Klein line as advertised in the March Vanity Fair.) If the ad was in color, you’d doubtlessly see a nice warm base tan over his exposed nipple. He’s totally oblivious to the daffodils I superimposed over him.

There’s a reason models in spring collections always look so fine: the clothes they’re modeling are being shot while the crew is spending America’s bitterest months in Turkey or South Africa. Throw a healthy dose of bronzer on top of a nice base and those 17 year old, impossibly beautiful young men and women are the very picture of perfection, inasmuch as a strong sneeze would knock any of the waifs to the floor.

You’ll never look that sleek. You’ll never be that young again. And in order to get that complexion you will have to quit your job, sell the car, put the house up for auction, and live in the tropics for a few months. Or, you can become one of those narcissistic tanning salon weirdos. The upshot is that the strong UV rays during the winter months will almost certainly help with the seasonal distress bummer that we’re all subject to. The downshot is melanoma and other fun skin cancers.

However, the rumpled cotton wardrobe is that which they’re really shilling, not the lifestyle it bespeaks. That’s what I keep finding in the pages of Vogue, Details, and GQ. Hottie teenagers fresh off the plane from their four month long safari, their kayaking journey in the tropics, their Australian walkabouts, all wearing rumpled carefree cotton shirts and pants over Italian-made leather sandals.

The cuffs of shirt and pants are always a little rolled-up, as if to say, “I may have just sanded barnacles off of the skiff, but there’s no way I’ve been at actual work; I can’t even remember what the office smells like. Would you like an iced tea? I drink them constantly, they match my organic hemp coulottes so well.”

Still, spring is when clothes get comfortable again, and that’s really what the fashions coming out right now are all about—liberation from layers and heavy insulation. As of the time of this posting it’s a balmy 55 degrees in New York, warmer than it’s been since November. People are running around in shorts and tee shirts already. Tomorrow it’ll actually reach the low 60’s, and you’d better believe that the NYU co-eds will be doing their annual flocking of Washington Square.

(We’ll be there to take pictures of their spring fashions, yep.)

It still looks like winter out there, but you know the daffodils are waking up under the soil, to emerge any day now. Likewise, so shall the rest of us who have toiled under winter’s snowy blanket during the long months. That’s one thing we’ve got over those jet-setting spoiled twats: we’ll actually appreciate the new warmth and the rebirth of the world in a real and meaningful way, regardless of whether we’re dressed in the latest unconstructed suits from Banana Republic or not.