return of the pantsuit; Tailored suits are making a major comeback.

Byline: Sarah Mower

Official announcement to all of us who have felt trouserless and jacketless, demoralized and rudderless, since Helmut Lang and Jil Sander packed up their pantsuits and disappeared over the horizon: There is hope. Helmut and Jil may be gone from their own labels, but now that a decent period of mourning has passed, tailoring for women is finally walking back from the wilderness. In a parting of the clouds of chiffon and tulle on the spring runways, there it was-a sudden blaze of ideas from designers in their 20s and 30s who are out to cut a new pantsuit.

The news, though, is that what's happening isn't going to be a rehash of the boyish, boot-cut, matte-black nineties. "I strongly believe it's really cool for a girl to have a pantsuit for day," Olivier Theyskens says. "But it's not a man's businesslike suit. More sensual. Not too polished. A bit looser. No padding." These are not words you'd expect to drop from the mouth of the very designer who turned the fashion tide toward femininity, cocktail dresses, and crinolines when he arrived at Rochas in 2003. The fact that the methodical Theyskens opened his show with two trouser suits-slightly crinkled jackets and slouchy pants, the first he's ever shown at Rochas-marks a subtle swiveling of the fashion Zeitgeist in a new direction. Where he leads, others will follow . . . and in the meantime, all over the fashion map, so many innovators, upstart labels, and brand inventors are converging on tailoring that it's beginning to feel like a groundswell.

Reviled and mocked as the "out" thing during the reign of "ladylike," the pantsuit is becoming the project of a thoughtful generation who know their history and study their technique, and are using it to arrive at distinctive looks of their own. "It took me one or two years to think how to do it," says Theyskens. "I admire the suits Armani, Calvin Klein, and Yves Saint Laurent did. But I feel very free to change the rules."

Making a trouser suit properly, it transpires, is infinitely more complex than stitching a dress or skirt. Some, like Theyskens, Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga (whose pantsuits are baroque, brocaded, and rock-'n'-roll), and Stefano Pilati at YSL (matador takes on "le smoking"), are coming at it from the direction of Parisian couture. In New York, Michael Kors and Francisco Costa, with their easy, wrinkled white summer suits, are walking the walk in the tradition of American sportswear. Others, like Hedi Slimane at Dior

Homme and Neil Barrett, are menswear designers wielding the scissors for women with all the precision of Savile Row.

More surprising are those crossing over to suiting from a jeans background. "People think of denim as casual-but it's just as complicated as, or more complicated than, tailoring," says cult-jean maker Rogan Gregory, who has a new tailored line called A Litl Betr. "It's all in quarters of an inch. Fitwise, you have to be on point, spot-on, sharp." Gregory is having his suiting done in Japan: "As with jeans, these are guys who for damn sure interpret 'American' better than Americans," he says. "We took in the waist very high and made a wide trouser with a masculine feeling. It's not traditional suiting, though. We engineered the fabric ourselves from cotton, linen, and cupro. It takes the edge off. My clothes always have to have a little trash in ...