Beware the Uggs of March

In these dreary days of gloom and converging midterms, the little bits of visual delight are sometimes all that pull you through. That and Girl Scout cookies.

But then it snows and immediately turns to a slushy mess, drastically cutting your own shoe options and forcing you to dodge flying muck tossed up by the dreaded Ugg boots corrupting about eight out of every ten female forms you pass (and even a smattering of the male ones).

I know it's been complained about to death, but there is nothing formally redeeming in footwear shaped in right angles with what looks like poorly groomed rodents nesting around their tops, sometimes dangling on strings. Seriously, ladies, there is a reason you don't see many Yetis featured in the pages of Vogue. (Though I hear their spring line of engorged ticks is quite fetching.)

Indeed, there comes a point when the sight of one more pair of Ugg boots with stretch pants stretched to their physical limits tucked into them, filtered through the customary week-before-spring-break haze of caffeine, overwork and fatigue, just might come perilously close to driving one to despair or destruction.

But then, the aesthetic luminary that is Cate Blanchett comes along in the latest issue of British Harper's Bazaar to remind us all that style has not, in fact, crawled off to die a furry, disproportioned, unflattering death. Oh, Cate, my pale, bony heroine, you keep me believing...