A tout de suit; For centuries, the suit has been a staple in a woman's wardrobe, from an aristocrat's hunting dress to the modern professional's powerhouse.

Byline: Jane Herman

Gone are the days when unknowing women would just walk into a store and ask for these expensive two-piece suits to go to work in." Isaac Mizrahi is remembering a time not that long ago, in August 1997, when his suit-a long, double-breasted tweed jacket matched with a boyish, full-legged pant-was pictured on the cover of Vogue's Suit Issue. Relaxed and flattering, with narrowish shoulders and a nipped waist, Mizrahi's suit was already much more feminine than its Frankenstein-proportioned eighties predecessor. But it was still a suit, in the strictest sense of the word. "I like that it's not pretending to be something else," Mizrahi says. "But you couldn't get away with it now. It'd look like the wrong office."

The suit for the right office, today's office-or restaurant or screening room or art gallery, for that matter-follows a radically different equation from the standard "jacket plus corresponding skirt or pants equals suit" that designers like Mizrahi once followed. No doubt the spring runways saw flashes of the Old Guard: a superwide leg at Chloe reminiscent of Yves Saint Laurent's swanky le smoking pant of the mid-sixties; broad, thigh-grazing jackets at Chanel and Michael Kors looking a lot like Calvin Klein's sexy boyfriend blazers, circa 1990; Ann Demeulemeester tuxedo vests man enough to rival Katharine Hepburn's and Annie Hall's. Still, these referential pieces were so fully integrated into a fresh repertoire of unexpected separates, it was hard to tell if the new looks could be called suits at all.

Were we witnessing the end of the suit?

As we know it, yes. In fact, the definition of suit needs significant revising if we're to qualify how labels from Armani to J.Crew have interpreted them this spring. Unlike its matchy cookie-cutter ancestor, the New Suit is a calculated medley of separates, harmoniously paired and seamlessly rendered. If its pieces are meant for one another, it's not because they match, per se, but because their fabrics and prints and proportions play off one another in brave and gratifying ways that would be a shame to break up. The New Suit references decades of inspiration-from Coco Chanel's relaxed twenties tennis suits to Karl Lagerfeld's late-eighties revision of her tweedy-clean fifties classic-all at once. Often its combinations are unheard of: Undercover's Jun Takahashi puts an ostrich-feather miniskirt with a two-button box-cut jacket. At Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs has pretty poufs beneath belted blazers and pairs those with choppy handkerchief skirts. Waists are high, jackets are square and long, and everything is a different color at Chloe. And Versace's white shorts meet the hem of a gold leather jacket mid-thigh. "It's a paradox, a game of opposites," says Donatella

Versace. "This new illogical order breaks all of the rules."

Take, for instance, the old eighties boxy top/tiny bottom rule, now overthrown by a significant turnout of small tops and small bottoms. Doo-Ri Chung calls her "legging-pant plus scarf-neck ...