Wide-eyed in the year of the peekaboo pelvis

It’s tough living in a town where you can pretty much wear shorts year-round. Summer comes and everywhere else folks are pulling off the woolens, filling up the cedar chests, high on the smell of new mothballs and the stripped-down exultation of bare legs, bare arms, bare toes.

For those who have bared so much for so long, all summer really means is that we’ll have to take a sweater to work, and maybe some socks, because now they’ve got the AC set to polar. (Those missing icecaps? Floating around in the second floor ladies’ room.)

Since our standard rate of skin exposure is so high, Angelenos have tended to be on the cutting edge of national nudity, if only to catch some of the Memorial Day thrill.

But it’s gotten so tough, hasn’t it -- what with Internet porn and the return of midriff halter tops (which still look odd and fake without a Jack Daniels logo) to make any kind of real statement. Thongs are passe, Mom’s wearing hot pants, and summer skirts are so short it’s difficult to pinpoint what it is they’re skirting.

So with hemlines essentially at the legal limit, and the exposure of female nipples still against the law, the brave among us have turned our attention to waistbands, already brought low by hip-hugging trends. In honor of our great-grandmamas’ defiant silk stockings the new edict is roll ‘em down. Way down.

Tan lines have become irrelevant, waxing a social requirement, and exposed to sun and stares is the last half inch of what is still clinically the belly, the skeletal cradle of civilization.

It is July 2003 -- the summer of the pelvic bone.

Now, it’s not like we’ve never seen them before. Prominent but clothed pelvic bones are a time-honored feature of the fashion runway and the red carpet; for years they have been a status symbol among the Wolfian “social X-rays” and others who judge beauty by emaciation level.

At the beach, naked pelvic bones have been as ubiquitous as Coppertone, a necessary feature of the aerodynamics and architecture of the string bikini -- without those promontories on which to rest, how would the thing remain in place anyway?

But lately, they’ve come inland, perhaps in search of food.

Now we see pelvic bones sashaying down Larchmont and Grand, making the rounds at the Galleria, ducking into a Santa Monica doctor’s office or even heading to work at the local cafe where casual attire has taken on a whole new meaning.

We see pelvic bones swelling beneath every hue of skin, and attached to both genders (though the guys don’t roll their waistbands so much as let them dangle, as if their clothes were just an afterthought, something Mom insisted on as they left the house.) Some pelvic bones are pronounced enough to hang a backpack on, others so swathed in flesh they are a matter of simple faith -- she is walking upright, ergo there must be pelvic bones in there somewhere.

We see them because there is no way for a human being, even a working mom with two small children, not to look at them. Nudity inevitably draws the human eye -- which explains all those non sequitur bikini-clad women in car ads -- especially when it involves a portion of the body previously covered. New nudity as it were.

The lower belly is unavoidably erotic, ripe with fertility symbolism and possibility; given the nature of gravity and desire, the eye and imagination inevitably move south. Ah, location, location, location.

All of which is well and good in the bedroom or the backyard or even at the beach. But really, are we all up to such sexual stimuli while loading groceries into the car at Vons or heading for a root canal? God know there are no prudes among us anymore, but aren’t pelvic bones, with all their procreative implications, well, private?

“Oh, I don’t think anything’s private anymore,” says Vincent Boucher, a celebrity stylist who had just seen the lowest-riding jeans of his life on a Stetson model in Women’s Wear Daily. “People have conversations about these very private things and they’re screaming them into a cell phone in the middle of the street. What’s a little pelvic bone after that?”

He thinks the recent exposure of the female pelvic cradle and the male “treasure trail” is changing more than the heart rate and rapid eye response of L.A. bystanders, mainly because a lot of the flesh that is showing is not necessarily, as Spencer Tracy once put it, “cherce.”

“Traditional waistbands are not the only boundaries that are changing,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of ‘well, this is just me,’ dressing going on out there. A lot of ‘what’s wrong with a fold or two of flesh, a few extra pounds?’ ”

Which may or not be aesthetically pleasing but is decidedly American. “In Europe, people are much more conscious of how styles will look in aggregate, on the street,” Boucher says. “Here, it’s all about self.” In L.A., he adds, there are lot of people trying to get attention; nothing gets attention like a lot of skin.

And if the soft underbelly doesn’t do the trick, many of the new rolled-down shorts have a flip side. The other accessory this summer is the lettered behind -- female seats are branded, with words like “Lifeguard,” “Gymnast,” “UCLA” and, of course, “Abercrombie.”

Where most short shorts cry “look at my butt” these are a bit more demanding: “Look at my butt,” they say. “Are you still looking? Keep looking. OK, now check out the pelvic bones. And have a nice summer.”