Here’s a riddle: What makes you look shorter if you’re already short, wider if you’re already wide and sluttier if you’re already leggy? What piece of fabric has the unique dual capacity to emphasize your tummy while making you look stumpy?

Walking around campus, I can’t help but notice the newest warm-weather iteration that girls of all persuasions are trying to make work. I call it the pillowcase dress, and it’s basically a long tube-top worn as a dress, hitting somewhere mid-thigh. It exposes everything that this season’s otherwise breezy fashions are trying to hide for you.

An aside: When I googled “pillowcase dress” to try to find the real name for this abomination of Forever 21 styling, I had no luck finding what I was looking for. I did, however, find several Web sites dedicated to making real dresses out of pillowcases. One problem, however, was that these smocks were chiefly for the 4-year-old fashionista set.

Last time I checked, the ladies who attend Northwestern are older (and more style-savvy) than my youngest cousin. They also tend to come in all shapes and sizes and ranges of taste. Nonetheless, the pillowcase dress seems to be a disease that is infecting everyone’s closet as the weather has warmed up – the leggings have been put away (thank god!), and the flip-flops and brightly-manicured toes have come out.

On normal girls, these strapless, slightly baggy, low-cut dresses are an obvious poor choice. And if you happen to have the kind of body that would look good in a cotton potato sack, one has to wonder why you choose something so reminiscent of Romper Room to complement your skeletal frame.

But the worst consequence is this: If you wear a pillowcase in public, others are going to want sleep on you, as opposed to with you.

Medill junior Kurt Soller is the PLAY fashion columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]