STEVE SAILER: Russians win Olympic fashion parade by rejecting unisex.

The Russians won the Opening Ceremony parade of nations fashion contest by simply rejecting the unisex orthodoxy for national uniforms. Just about every other country dressed both its male and female athletes identically, which can work at the Summer Games because that athletes aren’t wearing all that much in the way of clothes. But, at the Winter Games, everybody has to march into the stadium in heavily insulated winter wear, so females curves get buried. . . .

A few Eastern European countries dissented from unisex dogma. The Czechs at least gave the boys and girls different colored hats. The Poles were subtly but elegantly varied with the men in gray and white, the women in white.

The Russians went all the way and dressed the men in some sort of dark pea coat-like militaristic thing to make their men look strong in the upper body, while their women wore long fake fur coats nipped in at the waist and flaring over the hips to make them look sexy. The Russian’s execution of this basic concept — make our men look manly, our women look womanly — may have been less than ideal, but in the Culture War going on in Sochi, getting the basic concept right is a win for the Russkies.