cloud atlas; This fall, designers are listening to Mother Nature, with surprising and elegant results.

Byline: Sally Singer

When the fall collections were shown last February and March, the great subplot concerned that most banal of phenomena, the weather: New York was bone-chillingly cold, Milan was weirdly hot and wet, and only Paris, thankfully, delivered spring as we know it (and sing of it). For those of us who had to trek from show to show and country to country, there arose the vexed question of what to pack to be on trend and on temperature. How to wear Prada's color-blocked suede platform sandals in a northern Italy monsoon? How to show off your 3.1 Phillip Lim rosette T-shirt frock when the wind chill is arctic? We were reminded, in short, of the fundamental alignment between the cycles of fashion and the cycles of nature; and alerted, as we took in the collections, to the question of what happens to fashion when the natural seasons are no longer as predictable (or neatly cyclical) as The Farmer's Almanac once led us to believe.

The time has come to state what designers have recently come to grips with: that by necessity, they have become men and women of all seasons. The catwalks may mostly preserve the old demarcations between the hot and the cold, but step into a showroom and it's a different story. Nowadays you'll find a fur coat, a tweed suit, a little slip of a dress, a flat sandal, and a riding boot practically any time of year. This reflects the global market for fashion, but it also reflects the blurring, or turning upside down, of the actual seasons. And as the climate goes, so goes fashion.

And so, it seems, go coats. Once wearable for months at a time, they strike us increasingly as a relic from blissfully snowy yesteryears that no longer exist. Instead, this fall you'll buy a jacket-one that works indoors or out, and that conveys great style as much as utility. A deep-hooded and hump-backed shearling, say, from Rick Owens (whose show consisted entirely of jackets, each one more thrillingly urbane than the last). Or, from Balenciaga, wool blazers so intensely natty and preppy as to lead one to think of Carnaby Street rather than Connecticut. Or, from Ann Demeulemeester, a fluffy tailcoat that gives one rock 'n' roll and Victorian grandeur in equal measure.

Then we come to the new suits-the ones that bridge the microclimate of the air-conditioned office and the what-next weather going on outside. Step forward the trouser ensembles by Olivier ...