Who Wears Short Shorts?

Brigham Young University students are showing too much leg, the school’s president says. Rex E. Lee last week warned that if students continue to bare their kneecaps, the Mormon Church-owned school may be declared a shorts-free zone. The Utah university relaxed its dress code in 1991, allowing students to wear shorts as long as they are knee-length. To show students they can obey the rules and still be fashionable, posters on campus depict young men and women wearing regulation shorts--stopping at the middle of the kneecap--and standing around a sports car. The license plate reads: “2ZNEEZ.” Student Troy Cook told Lee at a question-and-answer forum that he was offended by violations of the dress code. “Like you, I’m pained and disappointed to see that students smart enough to get into BYU aren’t smart enough to know where their knees are,” Lee said.

* VOTING SHARES: Espirt, the socially conscious San Francisco clothing manufacturer, has launched a voter registration campaign. Through October the company will run ads in Harper’s Bazaar and Rolling Stone urging readers to “participate in the highest form of activism--voting,” according to a company spokeswoman. At the same time, Esprit stores will conduct voter registration drives. Meanwhile, Esprit is not ignoring the profit motive. Customers who must wear their convictions will be able to buy T-shirts with the vote message at 300 department stores nationwide.

* SMOKED OUT: Abimael Guzman, leader of Peru’s Shining Path rebel movement, can blame his arrest on his decidedly non-proletarian tastes. Reuter news service reports that police caught Guzman after searching trash left at the curb of his house and finding a pack of Yves Saint Laurent cigarettes--a brand Guzman is known to favor. Guzman remained seated at his desk when police crashed into his upstairs room. “He was completely calm,” said one police officer. “He didn’t even gasp.” The Reuter dispatch does not say whether Guzman was smoking at the time of his capture. . . . Meanwhile, in Paris, Saint Laurent’s fashion house posted a sharp drop in net profits for the first half of 1992, London’s Financial Times reports. Profits declined to $506,000, compared to nearly $8 million in 1991’s first half. The company said the drop reflected the depressed global luxury goods market, as well as costs associated with the launch of a skin care line.

* SUIT SALE: Whether dressed properly or undressed and pictured under lurid tabloid headlines, Britain’s royals have been having a tough time. But an old king’s clothes are doing just fine. In November, the auction house Christies expects to set a record price for clothing when it sells the wedding suit of King James II, who ruled England in the late 17th Century until he was overthrown by William of Orange. The richly embroidered coat and breeches, dating from 1673, are expected to beat the previous record of $96,800 paid in 1989 for a man’s ivory silk coat made in Italy or France about 1625.

The wedding suit is owned by the de Sausmarez family on Guernsey in the Channel Islands. A family ancestor who attended James’ 1673 wedding to Mary Beatrice d’Este, daughter of the Italian duke of Modena, received the suit as a memento. In the years since James wore it, the suit apparently has left the de Sausmarez family home only once, when it was loaned to a museum in London.