"It's every man for himself!" said the elephant as he danced among the chickens. Assuming the author is the model for these pics, I can hear female readers shouting "Easy for YOU to say!"

I am a "vive la difference!" guy, so I fully appreciate a woman who wants to wear a dress and look sexy in it. But there is no escaping the semiotics. In Travels in Hyperreality, semiotician Umberto Eco discusses the signs we send by the things we do, including how we dress. Here's an excerpt from a review of the book:

The wonderful thing about semiotics is that its unabashed practitioners can seriously ponder the details of daily life. In view of this permissiveness inherent in the field, Eco engages in deep thinking about blue jeans in “Lumbar Thought.”

Clothes are after all semiotic devices, media for communicating which could and should be analyzed in parallel with the syntactic structures of language. Aside from the heavier theoretical semiotic implications of clothes, the interesting thing Eco observes is that his jeans impose a demeanor on him. By walking around in a pair of jeans that are a wee bit too tight, he glimpses the daily experience of women who are forced by their clothes constantly to live a demeanor."

Turns out a cigar is very rarely just a cigar. And a dress is never just a dress. Thank God.