Peerless; This spring, trends take a backseat to ingenious beauty.

Byline: Sally Singer

For some time, fashion designers have been divided on the question of where things are going. We've seen skirts swell to Far from Heaven proportions, and simultaneously we've seen them narrow to _Garbo_esque slinkiness. The result has been a bountiful confusion of offerings, and this spring the bounty is as rich and as varied as ever. Down the catwalks came flowers of every scale and specimen, stripes of every width and provenance, moods cool and joyous, silhouettes clean and cluttered. One effect of a _multidirectional moment is that the best designers take the opportunity to return to their core strengths and preoccupations, and to challenge us with trends of their own devising. It's a time when there's no hiding behind accepted proportions and ideas-a time for shepherds, not sheep.

That said, there is a general agreement that lush _romanticism, on the one hand, and a certain beautiful spareness (not minimalism), on the other, currently provide the best grazing. In the former camp, the likes of Nicolas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga, Ralph Lauren, Thakoon, Dolce & Gabbana, Marc Jacobs, Junya Watanabe, Dries Van Noten, and Roberto Cavalli offered a gorgeous profusion of clothes abloom with everything from outsize decorator-_worthy poppies to tiny Liberty rosebuds to painterly splashings of petals. Whatever the particular flora, each designer expressed his distinctive viewpoint. Dolce & Gabbana may have been inspired by Julian Schnabel to pick up paintbrushes, but the corseted gowns they painted were unmistakably theirs. At Balenciaga, the highly constructed three-piece mini-suits have their maker's mark of obsession with form and couture tailoring. Ralph Lauren's neo-_Edwardian long dresses were an homage to a fabled New York of Easter Parades, lawn tennis, and Fifth Avenue grandeur. The trouble with florals, of course, is that they can readily look pastoral and twee. What Lauren and the others proffer this season is a master class in anti-_tweedom: Thus, you may want to jumble your flower prints madly and toss on some African beads (Van Noten's stunning solution); drape your ...