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Karl Lagerfeld and the American Fashion Awards had the same idea this year: Drop the weight.
The Council of Fashion Designers of America has worked hard to skim the fat off what has been, in all-too-recent memory, a sweltering marathon of an awards show. And on Thursday night, just like the Kaiser in his trim Diesel jeans -- so slight, in fact, that he slipped through PETA's projectile tofu pies, which muddied Amanda Harlech, Calvin and Kelly Klein and Fran Lebowitz -- this year's American Fashion Awards looked leaner and meaner than ever before.
Sandra Bernhard's fashion-tethered humor opened the show on a sharp note. With Bob Mackie's rhinestone dental floss twined around her, she didn't have anything on Cher, but her jokes scored -- starting with her profession of love, and lust, for Lagerfeld and moving on to a Seventh Avenue fantasia about Laura Bush.
"I brought her down to see the kids at Imitation of Christ," Bernhard cracked. "She thought they were a Catholic Mime troupe. We went everywhere from Lotus to Sway. We did blow...."
The evening's other jokesters were less successful. A gum-snapping Jimmy Fallon fell flat and a roomful of designers and editors was surely the wrong forum for a swaggering Brendan Fraser to test his "The Mummy Returns" shtick.
The evening's highlight was the presentation of a lifetime achievement award to Klein. Though Ingrid Sischy...