high tied; Are multi-everything scarves the next multiseason accessory.

Byline: Sarah Mower

We fashion people talk about trends-season in, season out-but I have learned by now how to recognize the difference between a whim and the signs of an epidemic. Here are the symptoms: Whatever it is has to be not just ubiquitous but counterintuitively, nuttily so. Having defied mere logical considerations like comfort and temperature, it has to become so habitual that women cease to notice there's anything unusual in it. Example: In 1994, I wrote a piece called "Sandals on Ice"-the first incredible sightings of bare legs in winter. In 2007, I bring you a sequel: "Mufflers in Midsummer."

Now look around. Girls under 25 have been up to this at least for months, the hard-core for a year or more. What "this" involves is a big scarf, usually square, folded into a triangle, then worn bib-wise with the loose ends wrapped round the neck. The fabric is printed, a bit rough and on the flimsy side. Sometimes it's shot with Lurex yarn and has a tatty fringe going on. (N.B.: "Flimsy" and "tatty" are good in this context.) You didn't really notice the importance of this until about May, because it was still too early to realize that these scarves had become so vitally welded to young women that they weren't going to cast them off even when it got hot. They did not cast them off when they were wearing sun smocks on baking streets or sitting in offices. Some couldn't go without them when they were wearing bikinis on beaches. Probably they never mentioned this to one another.

Credit Nicolas Ghesquiere with catapulting this street-and-school-generated craze to the forefront of fashion attention. When I sat next to him at the rehearsal of his fall show, watching the models stalk toward us with their hands jammed into slouchy khaki jodhpurs, he said, "They're like girls on a campus, no?" The scarves were wound up high around necks and tucked into little shrunken blazers. I blinked. Those metallic fringes, tassels, dangling charms, and mixed prints, like superrefined relations of street-market Indian, African, and Middle Eastern scarves, looked highly familiar. For one thing, I'd been seeing the cool girls of St. Paul's walking to school in them every day back home in London. For another, they're nothing exactly new. Alexander McQueen and Thomas Wylde have been tapping emo loyalty with their gauzy skull prints for the past couple of years. Yet they hardly hold the copyright, either. Their antecedents wind back through the rock-'n'-roll-slash-protest subculture of my own common-room years, right back to, let's face it, the Paleozoic era, when Keith Richards was a lad.

How to react, then? This has taken a little working out. First off, I have my dignity to worry about. Adopting any current teen trend can only put me in the category of Embarrassing Mom, so there has to be a sidelong way into this. When I delved into the consignment Vogue sent, the things I liked best were mossy Missoni knitted ...