this old thing? If last year was all about granny chic-all crocodile purses and gloves- this season's surprise star is granddad, with his rumpled tweeds, elbow patches, and leather-buttoned cardies.

Byline: Lynn Yaeger

It might well have started with Mademoiselle Chanel. Or Dietrich. Or Hepburn. Sick of crinolines and corsets, appalled by girdles, revolted by garters, these ladies went directly to their men friends' armoires and pilfered hunting jackets and flannel trousers, homburgs and tuxes.

While it's true that I have never dated a fellow quite as natty as Coco's beau the exquisitely turned-out Duke of Westminster, or messed around with a guy as chic as Dietrich's man the French Resistance leader and actor Jean Gabin, or knocked back a stiff one with Spencer Tracy, I, too, have on occasion danced over to the other side of the closet.

I am not alone in my enthusiasm this season. A penchant for baggy tweeds and roomy, raffish sweaters has taken hold, from the delightfully saggy cardigans at Chloe to the commodious cuffed trousers at Jean Paul Gaultier (so wide they look like the Oxford bags Sebastian Flyte wore in Brideshead Revisited) to Burberry's version of the traditional fusty cardie (gray, yes, but now shrunken and shot with silver). In other words, if last fall was all about grandma-her rose-diamond brooches! Her pussycat-bow blouses!-this winter grandpa has stolen the spotlight.

Just bear in mind that not every pappy qualifies as muse. Previous seasons may have lauded the virtues of a grandpa who was a miner or a farmer, but this is not the year for guys who work with their hands. Think Ralph Bellamy, not Ralph Kramden: an elegant chap in a smoking jacket padding around a library in monogrammed velvet slippers under a brace of baronial family portraits.

And why settle for feminized reinterpretations of menswear when you can take a page from Coco, Marlene, and Kate and go straight to the real menswear source?

With Bellamy's bedroom slippers in mind, I head for the Charvet boutique at the Bergdorf Goodman men's store in New York, where I happen to know that they sell just such shoes in a devastating little pouch. (I know this because I gave a pair to a guy once, hinting like crazy that he should let me keep the pouch. He did not.) The Charvet slippers are particularly appealing in un-fuddy-duddy shades like burnt orange and olive, but the salesman, as has been my experience in other cross-dressing adventures, is less than amused. "No, I've never sold them to a woman," he says. "What's the smallest size?" I