Keisha Nash-Whitaker >> Hollywood Modern: Los Angeles.(California)

Byline: --SALLY SINGER

She likes a more proper, dressed-up look--on the red carpet and off.

From London to Los Angeles, Milan to Mumbai, VOGUE toured eight cities around the globe to find the freshest takes on evening glamour.

On a crisp Los Angeles afternoon, Keisha Nash-Whitaker did a quick trawl of the December sales. She wore Earnest Sewn straight-leg jeans, a romantically layered top from Clu, Marni ballet flats in patent, and a plain black knit cap over stick-straight long hair--beatnik Audrey Hepburn meets scrubbed-down, incognito Diana Ross. At Maison Martin Margiela--the recently opened Beverly Hills boutique that, with its paillette-covered exterior, is as flashy as its designer is reticent--Nash-Whitaker fell for a black silk cardigan with a bias-draped back ("a funky grandpa sweater," she said) and a pair of high, black, full-calf boots. At Barneys she picked up an indigo silk frock from Lanvin. With her troika of demure yet sexy, conceptual yet classic, deeply discounted finds, the lip-gloss entrepreneur (Kissable Couture), miraculously enduring Hollywood wife (she and the actor Forest Whitaker have been married eleven years), and mother of three (ages nine to sixteen) was ready-set-go for a holiday party later that evening. Or maybe not. "I don't want to waste this look tonight. I'm going to save it for something more special."

Less than a decade ago, few L.A. nights would have been just special enough for a Lanvin-Margiela ensemble. Local custom dictated that big nights required sizable effort--floor-lengths, rocks, beads, bosoms--and all other evenings required youth, good jeans, and great genes. That has changed, in part because the younger crowd started buying vintage dresses to wear out to dinners and other medium-size evenings; and in part because women like Nash-Whitaker enjoy the daily business of dressing properly. "I wear flip-flops to the beach, not to lunch," she says; and, revealing her Bostonian background: "I wore my white Paige jeans past Labor Day, but it was a hard thing to do."

Call it a reaction to starlet trashiness, but Los Angeles seems to be in the throes of an elegance evolution. Youthful undoneness, so alluring for so long, now carries an uncomfortable connotation of cataclysmic undoneness. Jenni Kayne, a city native and designer, says, "It still looks wrong to dress up too much. But people are raising the bar, dressing more nicely than they used to, a little more New York. I like to dress proper--a little sleeker, a little ...