following the band; The clingy waist-making mini is back on the runway and the red carpet, courtesy of vintage Herve Leger.

Byline: Tim Blanks

The Leger Effect was an unnatural fashion phenomenon of the late eighties/early nineties, brought on by a young Parisian designer who was able to lend the wearers of his dresses a bombshell silhouette that quite literally defined the body-consciousness of the era. Herve Leger achieved his effect with curve-cleaving elastic bandages and a high-octane technique that defied tradition because he molded his fabric to the female form, rather than draping and cutting it. And as much as it defied tradition, his technique has also defied time, working its magic among the red carpet's more adventurous vintage fans, most recently Isla Fisher and Emily Blunt at the Golden Globes, and Kyra Sedgwick at the SAG Awards. As for Leger himself, business setbacks compelled his metamorphosis into Herve L. Leroux. Suffice it to say that his label was bought and sold a few times, he was eventually scissored out of the equation, and he lost his name. His new sobriquet, which means "redhead," was selected by old friend (and ex-boss) Karl Lagerfeld. But this is no sob story. One of spring 2007's most distinctive subtexts is the influence that vintage Leger appears to be exerting on both sides of the Atlantic. When he cast his eyes over the season's coverage, Leroux noted obvious echoes of his own past in white-hot Scottish designer Christopher Kane's sculpted sensations and the banded skirts and tops produced by Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough for their label, Proenza Schouler, in New York. He even detected a Leger inflection in Karl Lagerfeld's Fendi collection for spring. In which case, Lagerfeld was just bringing it all back home because Fendi was where the band dresses began in 1980. "Fur coats are made out of felt bands," explains Leroux, who was Lagerfeld's assistant at the time, "and I designed a skirt with them. Karl immediately asked me to do it in the workroom; then he did a whole story with it. He always loved that band story." (Given Lagerfeld's encyclopedic knowledge of fashion history, he would also undoubtedly have known that the doomed genius Charles James had already blazed the body-elastic trail decades before.) For the past seven years, Leroux's business has consisted of him, his sister Jocelyne, and two seamstresses. His rue Jacob studio in Paris was once the apartment of the legendary interior-design maven Madeleine Castaing, and under these startlingly low ceilings passed the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy and Winston Churchill. "A mythic place," Leroux calls it, which makes it ideal for the reinvention he felt was necessary after his various professional upheavals (the most recent being a design stint for Guy Laroche). "After Leger, I had to quit the band dresses," he says, without-it must be said-a trace of regret or bitterness. "It would have been one more fight. So now, when people ask me, I can tell them to go to Christopher or Proenza Schouler, because I'm not ready for it." It's a peculiar coincidence that Kane works-just like Leroux-with his sister, Tammy, in a tiny space (their apartment). And it was equally coincidental that the Scot happened to produce a spring collection that mimicked the Leger Effect. "I came across ...