Russians win Olympic fashion parade by rejecting unisex

The Russians won the Opening Ceremony parade of nations fashion contest by simply rejecting the unisex orthodoxy for national uniforms. Just about every other country dressed both its male and female athletes identically, which can work at the Summer Games because that athletes aren't wearing all that much in the way of clothes. But, at the Winter Games, everybody has to march into the stadium in heavily insulated winter wear, so females curves get buried. 

This may appeal to some athletes on the women's ice hockey team, but not to most women. My experience with skiing in California over the years is that snow bunnies generally wear the most skin tight clothes possible without general frostbite setting in.

(In general, the Winter Olympics are noticeably less lesbian than the Summer Olympics, due to a number of factors: if the premiere sport, figure skating, didn't exist, it would be invented by the Disney Corp. to sell more merchandise to Daddy's Little Princesses; the smaller number of team sports; and the general association of winter sports not with school but with expensive vacations.)

If on top of the insulation, you insist upon dressing the male and female winter athletes in the same exact clothes, it makes for a thoroughly unsexy look. Thus, the American squad all wore patriotic ugly Christmas sweaters that kind of looked like a Fourth of July family reunion where all your aunts and uncles decided it would be the cutest thing to make everybody wear the same bulky red-white-and-blue sweaters to attend a very chilly fireworks show in Juneau, Alaska, or something.

A few Eastern European countries dissented from unisex dogma. The Czechs at least gave the boys and girls different colored hats. The Poles were subtly but elegantly varied with the men in gray and white, the women in white.

The Russians went all the way and dressed the men in some sort of dark pea coat-like militaristic thing to make their men look strong in the upper body, while their women wore long fake fur coats nipped in at the waist and flaring over the hips to make them look sexy. The Russian's execution of this basic concept -- make our men look manly, our women look womanly -- may have been less than ideal, but in the Culture War going on in Sochi, getting the basic concept right is a win for the Russkies.