Oh la la! Only Sonia Rykiel could make such perfect adult floaties to match my daughter’s, while we frolic in the kiddie pool in Palm Beach this week. Yeah, I know knit is a touch impractical for aqua-wear, but it’s not like I need them to keep my head above water!

See 40 years worth of Sonia Rykiel’s superiority via the retrospective at Les Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the best city in the world.

Everybody has tried to get teen girls to quit smoking by appealing to their vanity, and everybody has basically failed with this method because no 16-year-old can imagine herself wrinkled and gray. But Teen Vogue’s anti-smoking story contains a hidden gem of genius that should have been employed to fuller effect: “According to research, smoking is a behavior that’s increasingly confined to mostly those who are non-college-educated and low-income.” Never mind that most models light up constantly. Smoking is trashy!

You know how women hit their sexual peak in their 30s? And you know how you’d think the opposite by looking at American Vogue’s Age Issue? Well, splat! French Vogue has finally, delectably set the record straight — at Club Carine Roitfeld, ladies in their third (and fourth, and fifth) decade look like they’re doing it day and night. In the fabulously sexy “30 vs 17,” Eva Herzigova stars as a thirty-something siren, alongside newcomer Anna Selezneva as a defiantly insouciant teen. While their relationship is deliciously ambiguous — are they friends? lovers? related? — their ages, gloriously, are not. As jauntily adorable as the younger Anna is, who wouldn’t prefer to be whipped into shape by Eva’s smoldering and domineering broad with experience?

See the full spread at 212DressingRoom.

The parenting wars make it so easy to feel altnernately smug and insecure that whiplash is a serious risk. So it was when I read The New Yorker’s much-discussed article on overparenting. Happily, the story made me feel like pretty hot parenting stuff. Of course Baby Einstein is baloney, patting myself on the back for keeping the MILFspring TV-free. And of course kids should make independent discoveries, as I observed the MILFspring figure out an entirely new purpose for a spatula. But then the MILFspring and I got into the elevator with a woman who happens to be a preschool teacher. Based on I don’t know what, she proclaimed the MILFspring extremely advanced and told me to not only get her watching Baby Einstein but also to “start doing kindergarten” at the kitchen table (the MILFspring is not yet two). The first suggestion I mentally dismissed outright — the owners of Baby Einstein are huge Republicans, and Republican children are robots — but the second, I considered for a wink. Fortunately, that genius Mr. MILF was like, “Aren’t we going to pay someone to do that with her in preschool?” And I realized I only need to teach her how to be a person. Who dresses real cute. Crisis averted!

If you were starting to fret that Paris Hilton was out with the boom times, you can relax. Tinkerbell’s mama is the major inspiration of the new extreme fashion trend in Japan called hime gyaru, or princess girl. Characterized by a disturbingly American Girl-like sense of beauty, the look, according to The Wall Street Journal, is for working women doing dress-up in their off-hours. As anti-feminist as hime gyaru seems to be, it makes me nostalgic for “Please Kill Me”-era East Village, when the streets were clogged with similarly enthusiastic freaks.