the magnificent seven; As "personal" dressing triumphs over mega-branding, a group of individualistic designers are pushing fashion into the future.

Byline: Sally Singer

There is a new mood in the land. If, in the last year or so, you have found yourself fastening a snug coat with grosgrain ribbon, or layering strands of tulle-caged fake pearls around your neck, or wearing the tiniest cropped jacket of black lace, then you have partaken of the dramatic romanticism that characterizes what is best and most directional in fashion today. That direction points, appropriately enough, toward the moody and introspective and away from the prosaic promptings of the external world. (Gone, or going, are streetwear, logos, and random assertions of fabulousness and power.) Design is no longer about responding to "what's out there." Rather, it is about exploring feelings and aesthetic ideas, poetically: Fashion, to paraphrase Wordsworth, is now emotion recollected in tranquillity (or, if you prefer, in washed gazar).

If one were to look for the Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley of the new movement, a good place to start would be the seven designers who assembled for Steven Meisel's camera on the morning of the 2005 Costume Institute Ball. "I felt as though I was a witness to my generation," commented Nicolas Ghesquiere of Balenciaga. When he's talking about his generation, Ghesquiere is, of course, referring to a septet united in sensibility rather than age (Miuccia Prada is old enough-just-to be the mother of 28-year-old Olivier Theyskens). Nor can it be said that this is a group that perceives itself as a collective, or carries on a theoretical conversation among itself. This is not the Antwerp Six or the Japanese Invasion. Some of our Magnificent Seven had never even met prior to the Meisel shoot, and indeed a few (say, the baroque Stefano Pilati and the minimal Narciso Rodriguez and the protean, pro-teen Marc Jacobs) might have cheerfully wondered what their work had in common.

Most fundamentally, these designers are creatively inclined to make fashion that is, to an important degree, about fashion. We've come through a time when the business focused on the Girl and her Needs. (She wants a twinset? Let's give it to her. Yeah, and a boot-cut jean!) Contrast that to Alber Elbaz presenting a resort collection for winter 2005 in which the ...