But . . . But . . . But . . .

High fashion is supposed to shock us out of our sweatpants doldrums. We understand that. We dealt with heroin chic and its messy hair, black eyes and purple lips. We coped with glitter. But, now, for the love of Pete, please tell us this is a someone’s idea of a sick joke: Hot pants are back.

We mean those butt-clinging, thigh-revealing short shorts that so flattered Catherine Bach in her iconic work as Daisy Duke in “The Dukes of Hazzard” . . . and made fools of so many of the rest of us.

It’s true that, in some worlds, hot pants never really went extinct--the junior market, for example. “We carry some version of hot pants season in, season out,” says Moses Strathern, a salesman at XOXO jeans showroom at CalMart. Of course, XOXO’s main customer is 16 to 32 and cellulite free.

But during the just-concluded spring fashion shows, everyone from the perfectly reasonable Ralph Lauren to naughty boy Alexander McQueen showed hot pants on the runways.

And, says Joan Kaner, senior vice president and fashion director of Neiman Marcus, we’re going to see them in big girl stores soon. “I think it’s one of the two directions for spring. One is, let’s call her the sex kitten or the vamp. The other is the proper lady,” she says.

So, ladies, we are saved. Those of us who can swagger into a resort wearing satin hot pants and little else may feel free to do so. The rest of us who wore them in the same era as Ms. Duke--circa early ‘80s--will be tsk-tsking appropriately in our proper heels and knee-length skirts.

One of fashion’s most fortunate commandments is this: If you wore it once, you don’t have to wear it again.