1. the exclamation point; French stylist Marie-Amelie Sauve wears long, tight pants-punctuated with weighty shoes or sharp shoulders.

Byline: Mark Holgate

Marie-Amelie Sauve is pondering the question of when, exactly, she became enamored of her signature way of dressing. Sauve is a Parisian stylist who works for French Vogue and is also a collaborator and confidante of Nicolas Ghesquiere at Balenciaga. She has become renowned for working one look and one look only, to devastating effect: a jacket with strong, defined shoulders and the skinniest pants that she can squeeze into. With her narrow frame and long dark hair with heavy bangs, the resulting visual statement suggests that someone has just taken a black Caran d'Ache pencil and quickly, unwaveringly slashed downward to create a single slick, sharp line.

"That's not the only way I dress," Sauve protests, laughing. "Today I am in a dress!" Ah, but the dress is a slim black to-the-knee Balenciaga Edition, and it is worn with a black Balenciaga blazer that tapers to the waist, black Wolford leggings, and pointy Manolo Blahnik Mary Janes. Again, that preference for stark elongation. "For sure, I am always wearing fitted things," she concedes. "I'm obsessed with how clothes fit. The most important thing when a woman gets dressed, I think, is that everything should look impeccable on her, as if it were made for her."

It turns out that Sauve had her epiphany early on. Her mother, a fashion illustrator, sometimes wore haute couture, and it was one of her mother's Courreges pantsuits, which fit to perfection, that has stayed in Sauve's mind's eye. No wonder that by the time she was sixteen she had hunted down a dressmaking store near where she grew up in Paris and was having everything possible in her wardrobe refitted to her exact proportions, even her jeans. "You know, they could be so wide," she says, tugging at the thighs of an imaginary pair of voluminous denims. "Now you have skinny fits, like Superfine, which I wear, but not then." Sauve's look rests, literally, on her legs. "They are very important," she says. "I am quite obsessed with the legs. Not to show them off, but so that you appear long, long, long."

These days Sauve doesn't need to bother with the dressmakers, since the bulk of her clothes are made to order at Balenciaga, where she has been working with Ghesquiere for the ...