going to extremes; Can two opposing fashion forces- the long, linear column and the curvy, big-skirted silhouette-peacefully coexist.

Byline: Sarah Mower

I've always thought that if you have a small, tight shoulder and long, skinny arms, it sets the head off really gracefully," says Rick Owens. "Once you have that, it gets the eye fixed, and then you get an impression of length and grace flowing down from that. It was always about flowing rather than gripping."

Owens, who is fitting Georgina Grenville (the model who defined the columnar forms of Gucci in the nineties) into a slither of bias satin and a luxe mink bolero from his new Palais Royal fur label, is describing his "drippy" silhouette. His template-fluid as it may be-is a fixed point in the long-drawn-out woman's universe. I had rung him for counseling after I was awoken one morning by a friend, R., calling during resort shows in New York. "Don't you think it's going fifties?" she asked. "Big skirts, small waist? Call up vogue.com, Prada. See?" She was right. Ballerina-length. Dirndl-ish. Feminine. In the days that followed, Frida Giannini at Gucci and Donna Karan put big skirts in their resort collections, too. And when the New York spring shows hit, they were in breakout mode at Donna, Anne Klein, and Oscar. (Granted, they're usually somewhere at Oscar.)

"I find that kind of rude, like you're not the right shape," says Owens, who recently won a National Design Award for fashion. "I always think it's more polite to let fabric flow over curves."

Quite. Nip me in the place where a waist should be, keep it flaring on out, and I'm a vast-hipped blob. Queen Celeste in Babar, not the young Princess Margaret in Christian Dior circa 1953, whose image I see behind those Prada resort florals. Time was, this would've meant staring down the barrel of another spell in fashion exile for women like me. When Miuccia last got up to her inexorably influential skirt-inflating tricks in her 2004 "fifties lady tourist in Italy" phase, I was lost. There was no alternative.

But something else is happening. Where R. was seeing circle skirts, I saw narrowness. Look at L'Wren Scott: She has the glamour-skinny down, not just in her licorice-stick pants and ankle-grazing coats but in ...