I am firmly anti-poncho. This article is so funny, and it sums up my view entirely.
Is That a Real Poncho?
The hideous new trend afflicting America.
By Amanda Fortini
Fashion crimes, like many other crimes, begin innocently enough. A few influential designers send a quirky and impractical article of clothing down the runway; high-fashion magazines enthusiastically push it; a celebrity is photographed wearing it; lower-end lines begin mass-producing it; suddenly, women are buying it in shrieking colors and synthetic fabrics, and what started as a harmless act of whimsy has become a widespread aesthetic offense. So it has gone with the poncho—that rectangular piece of material resembling a small blanket, with a hole in the center for your head. The style, now at its apogee, appears both in mainstream stores like Ann Taylor, the Gap, J.C. Penney, and Macy's (which offers 43 options in a ponchos-only department) and in high fashion magazines like Vogue, in which New York socialite Plum Sykes sports a fringed, yellow, off-the-shoulder number, and Bazaar, where a $1,500 Chloe "horse blanket poncho" is deemed one of the season's "must-haves." Recently, during a 20-minute walk in Midtown Manhattan, I counted 18 ponchos—averaging nearly one per minute. Ponchos have become this season's Ugg boots: unsightly and overexposed.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2108192/