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"  It happens outside an unfamiliar airport, in a city I&amp;#039;ve never visited. The car service that&amp;#039;s supposed to arrive for me is nowhere in sight. (I know, I know\u2014first-world problems, but bear with me.) Finally, a car\u2014my car, I&amp;#039;m certain \u2014creeps past in several lazy circles. Waiting there, frozen, Ozymandias in a peacoat, I realize that the driver does not recognize me, now the lone passenger outside the airport, as someone he could be transporting. It bears mentioning that I&amp;#039;m 5&amp;#039;9&amp;quot; and blond, not easy to miss. But it&amp;#039;s the way I&amp;#039;m dressed that&amp;#039;s holding me back (and not just in this scenario, unfortunately). I look younger than my 28 years and compound the problem by outfitting myself in an almost flagrantly casual way. Call it androgy-nous\u2014if you&amp;#039;re feeling charitable\u2014or just sloppy. The point is, you definitely wouldn&amp;#039;t mistake me for the kind of woman who is accustomed to being chauffeured. There&amp;#039;s something to be said for dressing for the life you have (in my case, writing for a fashion magazine), for rising to the occasion instead of greeting it in ratty Converse. In sneakers and scrubby jeans, I&amp;#039;ve nailed the &amp;quot;couldn&amp;#039;t care less&amp;quot; look, but I&amp;#039;m not exactly radiating authority. Of course, I&amp;#039;m not the only one who&amp;#039;s guilty of this extreme underdressing. For what seems like forever now, fashion has been in thrall to the off-duty-model look, christening spiky bags after such bedheaded sprites as Hanne Gaby Odiele, whose street style ricochets all over the blogosphere. Even if you don&amp;#039;t go in for street-style slouch, the other prevailing themes of late\u2014kaleidoscopic digital prints, tough-girl leathers, and C\u00E9line-style minimalism\u2014haven&amp;#039;t been overtly womanly, either. Effortlessness has been the name of the game for so long, it&amp;#039;s hard to imagine that dressing in a way that is regal and elegant would feel so appealing, even cool. And yet we&amp;#039;re fresh off the spring runway shows, and the image that&amp;#039;s snagged on my subconscious runs counter to all those trends. Call it the return of romantic, aristocratic dressing. This season, a wave of flounces swept over shoulders, grazed the d\u00E9colletage, and lapped gently at the edges of hems. Since I&amp;#039;m a classic movie buff, they put me in mind of Greer Garson in 1942&amp;#039;s Mrs. Miniver, standing up to the Nazis\u2014and looking great doing it\u2014in a sizable ruffle-trimmed collar. Or Joan Crawford as the titular socialite in , sporting an Adrian gown that was fa-mously knocked off right and left by department stores following the film&amp;#039;s 1932 release. You could see their influence echoed in the queenly high-necked gowns at Gucci, or at Givenchy, where Riccardo Tisci eschewed goth leathers and rottweiler motifs in favor of flounced numbers in\u2014heaven forfend\u2014baby blue. And as part of his final collection for Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesqui\u00E8re poured his models into the sharp flamenco curves of an Oscar Niemeyer building. Even at London Fashion Week, where digital prints and club-kid silhouettes tend to dominate, glimpses of a more genteel aesthetic could be seen. Ogling the Beatle boots at J.W. Anderson (the boy wonder who&amp;#039;s been tapped by Versus to design a capsule collection), I was distracted by the coffee-filter-like ridged tops encircling the models&amp;#039; tiny torsos. And at enfant terrible Thomas Tait&amp;#039;s show, held at a graffiti-covered skate park on the banks of the Thames, I was bracing myself for a Lords of Dogtown moment when, instead, fresh &amp;#039;60s silhouettes in sherbety pastels paraded out. Were those subtle ruffles trimming the sides of the designer&amp;#039;s boyish Bermuda shorts? These discreet versions of the ruffle bear almost no resemblance to their fifteenth-century cousins, which originally decorated chemises before being reinvented as stiff, Elizabethan-era ruffs. More recently, flounces enjoyed a &amp;#039;30s heyday only to fall out of favor a decade later due to wartime fabric rationing; in the &amp;#039;70s, they re-emerged among both ladies of the canyon and tonier types. For Frida Giannini, inspiration came via Richard Avedon and Gian Paolo Barbieri photographs: &amp;quot;These are portraits of aristocratic women,&amp;quot; Giannini explains, &amp;quot;evoking a strong allure with a clean, precise, defined aesthetic.&amp;quot; One of the most memorable looks in this vein was the tiered peekaboo gown that the statuesque Frida Gustavsson flaunted down Prabal Gurung&amp;#039;s spring runway. When I arrive at an early-morning visit to Gurung&amp;#039;s studio, an aerie high above the grit of Manhattan&amp;#039;s Garment Center, I can picture it as the kind of place one of my &amp;#039;30s heroines might inhabit\u2014dazzlingly light filled, with vases of fresh-cut flowers covering every chrome and glass surface. Yet the designer tells me that he hasn&amp;#039;t been holed up watching black-and-white movies on a Netflix instant loop. Instead, his inspiration came very much from the present day, especially &amp;quot;hearing about women&amp;#039;s issues and rights at the hands of certain men. It&amp;#039;s about freedom. That&amp;#039;s all I kept on thinking about. That translated into silhouettes that fall slightly away from the body. And you saw a lot of ruffles and flounces: It&amp;#039;s the idea of flight. Like you&amp;#039;re about to embark on your own journey.&amp;quot; Wait, did this design darling just equate frills with freedom? Unabashed ruffles tend to put me in mind of the Easter dresses I was forced to don as a child (cue the full-body shudder). But rather than evoking a Madame Alexander doll\u2014or, worse, a layer cake\u2014these wide, unfussy flounces felt utterly refined. To Gurung, they evoke the opposite of girlish silliness: They are authoritative, even dignified. &amp;quot;I strongly believe that it&amp;#039;s the intelligence of the girl that matters,&amp;quot; Gurung says. &amp;quot;Some of my customers are big-time lawyers who wear pencil skirts or jackets with a little bit of flounce. It&amp;#039;s no longer a mandatory, &amp;#039;You have to wear a pantsuit.&amp;#039; A prime example is our first lady. She has great style, but you can&amp;#039;t deny the fact that she is a woman of substance.&amp;quot; The flounced look isn&amp;#039;t just for the corporate set, however. Though the East Village\u2013dwelling Gurung laments that he&amp;#039;s surrounded by St. Marks Place punks, he recently made an expedition to visit friends in Brooklyn and was startled by what he found there. &amp;quot;The coolest girls in Brooklyn are not dressed in torn jean shorts with pockets hanging out,&amp;quot; he marvels. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re actually dressing up. They&amp;#039;re really making an effort. And that was interesting to me.&amp;quot; But dressing up doesn&amp;#039;t mean committing head-on to the retro look; there&amp;#039;s a certain cool factor involved. While ruffles are the ultimate feminine signifier (remember the derision Jerry faced for his puffy, pirate-style shirt on Seinfeld?), the key to making them look of the moment is tempering the motif with plenty of restraint. Tait tells me that rather than show allover ruffles, which he derides as &amp;quot;the bullfighter look,&amp;quot; he opted for a straight-up-and-down silhouette with a slight flounce at the bottom, &amp;quot;so when you&amp;#039;re moving, you kind of have a kick, but not in an overly girly way.&amp;quot; For example, his silk schoolgirl skirts were constructed with vertical stretch as opposed to the industry-standard horizontal, eliminating bulk and giving the pieces a lean drape. He also manufactured some of the pieces in an activewear factory, which lent his designs a sporty sheen. To hear Tait tell it, he is designing for a new breed of woman. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d be the first to admit that maybe my perspective of what is femininity or what makes a woman look elegant is not necessarily the typical, or commercial, idea of what is feminine or sexy or interesting. It&amp;#039;s not necessarily going through the obvious routes of a bra cup built into a dress, or a corset, or a slit up the thigh. It&amp;#039;s a lot more complex than that nowadays.&amp;quot; The drama inherent in this style of dressing comes not from what it reveals but from its mystery, which allows the wearer to convey a certain reserved authority. I allow myself a thought experiment. Would Hillary Clinton have seemed any less in command of the State Department if she&amp;#039;d switched out her pantsuits for a soft C\u00E9 dress? Could Yahoo!&amp;#039;s Marissa Mayer still captivate a boardroom in a flounced Gucci blouse? (Look at French politician S\u00E9gol\u00E8ne Royal, who sports this look to perfection.) If these clothes could talk, they&amp;#039;d be sending the message &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m comfortable enough in my femininity to flaunt it, rather than thinking it makes me look weak.&amp;quot; Now that I understand how this look befits the strong women who wear it, I&amp;#039;m inclined to reconsider my earlier stance on the matter. Maybe there&amp;#039;s a power lurking in these clothes that I could be harnessing. After all, the question is one of choice: You can choose to free yourself from the hegemony of the conventionally sexy, and you can choose to assert your power in a quieter way. Ultimately, reflects Tait, &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s about integrating something a little bit more outrageous, like all the ruffles, and then something that relates to you on more of a day-to-day basis, and is a bit more honest, what makes you feel comfortable\u2014what you&amp;#039;d be happy going to the grocery store in.&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t know how I feel about debuting this look at Trader Joe&amp;#039;s, but the next time I&amp;#039;m stranded at the airport\u2014perhaps wearing one of Tisci&amp;#039;s sweeping gowns\u2014I doubt I&amp;#039;ll have so much trouble getting a ride. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/trend-reports/news/a12553/fashion-trends-frills-spring-2013/>