adult content; The fashion world is blazing, once again, with sexy clothes and images of provocation.

Byline: Mark Holgate

You'll be facing a stark fashion decision this fall, if the recent run of New York shows is anything to go by. You can choose to follow in the footsteps of Marc Jacobs and load as many layers as possibly onto your frame-a fantastic, forgot-to-say-when mix of maxicoats and loose tunics and massively wide pants and leg warmers (leg warmers!). Or you could take your lead from a cache of the city's young creators and say, loud and proud: Sex Is Back. Basically, the new sexy means a shapelier, more structured-though still covered-up-silhouette that's way more body conscious than anything we've seen in a long, long time. Derek Lam did it. Thakoon Panichgul did it. And so did Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough of Proenza Schouler (who simply had had quite enough, thank you, of the ruffles and the lace and the bohemian flourishes). "We both just felt that it was time for something sharper and cleaner, something with a touch of the nineties," says the 27-year-old Hernandez. "And neither of us sees this as a passing trend; it's what we're really feeling for now."

Ahhh, the nineties. It's interesting that many of the newer designers trying out this sexier look weren't designing yet back then: They view the decade with a certain detachment; they're free to be intrigued by it. "We haven't really talked about sex since Tom Ford and Gucci, but it feels like the right time," says 27-year-old Panichgul. "Women have always wanted to look sexy, but they don't want an overt sexiness-now it's sexiness for yourself."

Sex dominated the culture of nineties fashion so much that even the relatively innocent act of purchasing a handbag was imagined to possess an eroticism previously experienced only on the pages of Anais Nin. Back then, fashion was so much about sex-remember Gianni Versace's bondage evening dresses and Calvin Klein's barely-knew-you-were-dressed nude slips and Tom Ford's corporate porno chic for Guc_ci, which reached its zenith with the G logo shaved into model Louise Pedersen's pubic hair?-that no one would have batted an eyelid if their dress had lit up and asked if it was good for them, too.

In the past five years, of course, that skin-show culture has been pushed back into the closet by the all-_prevailing ladylike look. Women began to crave a mood of charm and intimacy in lieu of lewdness (witness the virginal white lace that's everywhere these days). It has been gratifying to see that occasions that once called for a forlorn display of flesh have turned into something far less desperate. But at the same time, Hollywood's red-carpet choices of late suggest that the lady look has perhaps become a little too safe-stultifying in its appropriateness. Just take a cursory glance back at Golden Globes night, awash as it was in carefully wrought elegance: all those actresses so neatly dressed and adorned, and any individual or interesting impulses suppressed in the name of seriousness and the respectful gesture. "I call it Us Weekly dressing," says Panichgul. "When you treat wearing a dress like a press release, without any feeling or emotion, well, that's just not interesting."

Inevitably, the pendulum is now beginning to swing and sway in a sexier, more adventurous direction. . . . But what will distinguish 2006's "sexy" from the "sexy" of yore? "Fashion craved sensationalism in the nineties, and we all embraced it," says Stefano Pilati, creative director of Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, who was working in Milan during that raunchy time. "But it went too far and crossed the line into vulgarity." (If you don't know what he's talking about, consider all those budding starlets-and those who quite frankly were already famous enough to know better-who went out ...