Wise-cracking fashion? The cheek of it all.

There's an undying trend that seems to have too many of the world's males in its evil clench, one that shows no signs of letting go. Let us now speak of the all-too-revealing sartorial horror: The all-too-low-slung jeans.

I blame it on Calvin Klein, circa 1993. I blame it on Mark ('Marky Mark') Wahlberg, the campaign's model-of-choice, and his rippled torso, jeans suggestively lurking low around the crotch, the multi-billion dollar wink of his crisp Calvin Klein Y-fronts, ahem, fronting up.

It was an incredible advertising tour de force, one that left countless men and women hot under the collar, if not the trouser. However, in its lingering wake, it has left millions of today's teenage and adult men under the illusion that it is entirely acceptable to wander the earth in what they consider to be a state of buttock-bearing brilliance. Did they not get the memo? Let us consider its provenance: Underwear. In this filtered-down version of CK mastery, the saggy, off-white jocks atop a half-hearted jean has become a prominent embarassment on the street. How low can fashion go? Belts sigh, "I tried"; jeans shrug, "Why do I bother"?; the wearer boasts, "I'm kickin' ass!" Er, not quite.

And yet, let's be honest, this abhorrence isn't the sole domain of the male. Lest we forget that women have fallen prey to the lure of low jean and its partner-in-crime, the g-string. Whilst seated or bending over, the proverbial lower cups runneth over and, by proxy, so does the underwear. There should be some sort of 'how-to' to accompany the wearing of this popular garment. We have washing instructions, why not how to wear the under so it doesn't awkwardly become the outer?

Of course there was, for a very brief time, a celebrated retour de force of the derriere in the upper echelons of the fashion world. Do you remember the brouhaha that the brilliant Alexander McQueen caused with his 'bumster' jeans? Cut so low, underwear was verboten and the buttocks became the fleshy focus; a veritable 'bottoms up' that only the very brave, the very perky, and, perhaps, the very stupid cottoned on to. But in lowering the cut, McQueen raised headlines, and the brand forged a singular swathe into the world's media and, in turn, formed a part of his masterful legacy.

So where does this leave us? Do we pull up the pants and leave the rear behind, as it were? I'd like to think so. The amount of below-the-belt revealing has left me reeling, and I'm certainly no prude. For in this case, it's most certainly not what lies beneath that counts.

If things don't change soon, I, for one, will be seriously bummed out.