Anna Wintour's sequined, seahorse-looking Karl Lagerfeld dress was controversial back when the Vogue ruler wore it to the Costume Institute gala in May. Time's final verdict is another slap to the embattled editor.

Calling the dress the worst "fashion faux pas" of 2008 is, of course, a shameless publicity stunt by Time, which is publishing a listicle orgy called "The Top 10 Everything." Sounds very Digg-friendly!

The Wintour-hating Europeans have already taken the bait, but Britain's Daily Mail was kind enough to concede that the dress "stole the show" at the gala, which Wintour hosted.

Wrote Time (emphasis in the original):

When the history of modern fashion is written, this will be its Waterloo moment. The unimpeachably stylish Vogue editor Anna Wintour turns up at the premiere fashion event of the year, the Met Costume Gala, which she is hosting — it just doesn't get any better than this — in a dress that makes her look like she's encrusted with ammonoid fossils.

An "ammonoid," in case you don't know, is a vicious, near-extinct cephalopod predator of the "fashionrag" family, requiring for survival a lush environment of glossy wood byproduct, generous expense accounts and masochistic assistants, and generally agreed to have been suddenly endangered by the rise of reality television, the internet and bitchy roman a clefs. (If seen in the wild, do not approach.)