Who's that girl? It may not see the light of day on the red carpet or the glossy gossip pages-and that's exactly why we want the little-known, but fabulous, Anonymous Dress.

Byline: Jane Herman

There's such a fragile chemistry between a woman and a dress," says Alice Ritter, the 35-year-old Brooklyn designer who won the hearts of girlish urban women this spring with her lace-embellished minifrock with a ruffled bib collar and three-quarter-length sleeves. Despite the relative anonymity of Alice Ritter, the bib-collar dresses were sold out in three hours at Curve in Los Angeles. "It's a very personal thing," Ritter says. "I like to think that every dress has its owner." And, by the same token, every woman has her dress.

Ritter, who moved to the States from Paris nearly eight years ago, meets all the requirements of a charming young designer: the French accent, the loft across the river, the hyperfriendly dachshund, the side-swept bangs. Curiously, it is the very obscurity of Ritter's work that women want: Just left-of-center on the fashion radar, a Ritter dress is less likely to turn up at a cocktail party on someone other than you. It makes a statement without toting the heavy baggage that's packed with a big-name label.

In a season rife with talented young designers making real clothes for the wearer's sake-rather than "directional" clothes for innovation's sake-the Anonymous Dress has come out on top. It references trend without regurgitating it. Its undeniable fashion-forwardness credits its wearer with style without screaming her pedigree.

"A woman wants to feel like a dress belongs to her, like it was made for her," says Phillip Lim, whose 3.1 line is a top seller at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills and whose "proper but slightly undone" spring dresses are favorites at Barneys New York. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the recent pandemic of synonymous dresses on the red carpet and elsewhere could explain why so many designers, from New York (Phillip Lim) to So Paulo (Tufi Duek) to Sydney (Susien Chong and Nic Briand of Lover), have gravitated toward ultraneutral, all-anonymous white.

A white dress is, after all, the ultimate blank canvas. Without lacking personality-Lover's almost-innocent white-lace dresses recall the thrilling verge of adolescent rebellion, and Jovovich-Hawke's romantic tulle ruffles have all the magic of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel-they provide women with an opportunity to enhance and embellish a given silhouette. What could be a better base for the season's homespun bags, chunky platforms, and big belts than Ritter's white shift or Phillip Lim's embroidered-silk shirtdress?

Brazilian designer Tufi Duek, whose off-white Grecian minidresses are ultrafeminine while avoiding the ...