Ladies' Man.(fashion designer Alber Elbaz)

People still have money. Some people, that is, have some money. And if they are female people they probably want to look sophisticated and attractive, but not flashy or aggressively sexy--although they may well have wanted to look that way a decade ago. "Hot" was what we called it then, if you recall. But now is not the time to be assertive about your cleavage or (what remains of) your wealth. It isn't the moment for consuming conspicuously, and that is a terrible problem for retailers, who are still reeling from the disastrous holiday season. Yet as long as women believe it is their duty to be beautiful--which, we can safely assume, will be until the end of time--there will still be a fashion industry. And women will continue to spend four figures for a dress, if they think it will make them look just right, right now.

One afternoon this winter, Alber Elbaz, the designer of the Paris fashion house Lanvin, was bounding around the second floor of Barneys on Madison Avenue, where dozens of women of means had come for the chance to meet him and place orders for his spring collection. A blonde in her early twenties was posing in front of a three-way mirror in glittering Lanvin pumps and a candy-pink strapless cocktail dress with clear plastic paillettes adorning the bodice; she was contemplating the frock for her engagement party. Her mother sat nearby, looking extremely pleased. The garment in question cost $4,525. Elbaz adjusted the fabric on the woman's pale torso. "Beautiful," he told her, and he wasn't lying.

Elbaz often describes his work as "classic with a twist." This is precisely what looks fashionable now: an elegance that reassuringly summons the past but with some funkiness around the edges that acknowledges our weird present. One dress, a modest sheath, had a knife-pleated coral satin skirt with a top knit from rosy, flesh-colored wool in a kind of waffle weave; embedded in each depression of the waffle was a mirrored silver disk. Another dress had black and navy Grecian goddess-style draping in the front and flat, unfettered aqua silk in the back--"so you can sit down," Elbaz explained. At the Golden Globes this year, Maggie Gyllenhaal wore a version of one gown, a single-shouldered sheath with a great festive pouf at its peak. She looked lovely and refined--as women tend to in Lanvin--though the garment was made of bright-turquoise fabric with pink-and-black leopard spots. Elbaz's aesthetic is a remarkable mixture of the soigne and the daffy, which has come to seem more alluring as the times have become increasingly dark.

In the eight years that Elbaz has been designing for Lanvin, the oldest surviving French fashion house, he has transformed it from a dusty artifact of the Parisian past into something influential and prominent. Cecilia Sarkozy, late of the Elysee Palace, was often photographed dressed in Lanvin. Tilda Swinton won an Oscar last year wearing a voluminous black velvet creation by Elbaz. (Elbaz went over the dress with a steamer, giving it what Swinton calls "that dappled, molten-oil look." It "was so exactly what I wanted to wear . . . sincerely comfortable, modest, superchic, profoundly modern." She looked like an extremely elegant bat.) In 2007, Lanvin posted revenues of $148.9 million, sixty per cent higher than two years earlier, and Elbaz's vision has started to trickle down to the mass market: Target has sold knockoffs of Elbaz's enormously popular pearl-and-ribbon necklaces; Club Monaco offers a version of his chiffon-trimmed cardigan.

There are many designers whose work can make women look thinner or prettier. Elbaz seems to have the power to make women appear more interesting. Several years ago, Barneys' creative director, Simon Doonan, hosted an event for Elbaz in Los Angeles, at which Doonan had imagined that models would walk around the room wearing Lanvin while the guests ate dinner. Elbaz hated the idea. He wanted twinkling chandeliers and a runway. Barneys obliged, but expended its budget, and was reduced to using "local talent" for the models. Doonan assumed that Elbaz would be horrified. But when the show began, Doonan recalls, "not only do the local girls look beautiful and stylish, they actually look like fascinating people. Alber is an alchemist: he took these California chippies and turned them into Left Bank existentialists. Instead of Tara Reid, I saw Jeanne Moreau."

"The highest compliment a woman can receive is 'My God, she looks smart!' not that 'she's sexy,' " Elbaz wrote in a foreword to "Lanvin," a lavish Rizzoli coffee-table book. The ladies at Barneys seemed to concur. Outside the dressing room, there was frenzy. People were not quite ripping the samples out of one another's hands, but it felt as though they were on the verge. "Every Lanvin trunk show we do is like a scene from 'The Day of the Locust,' " Doonan said. "Alber's clothes are like crack for women."

Looking over the menu one morning at the Carlyle Hotel, Elbaz said, "Should we be good today or bad? Maybe we start good and get bad later." He ordered the fruit salad. He wanted the pancakes.