Straight Lace.

Byline: editor: Sally Singer S. MOWER

How a fabric so closely associated with doilies and "I do's" found its way back into fashion's favor.

Miuccia Prada has a problem with lace. That might seem odd for the very designer who ordained it the most prominently fashionable fabric of the season, but backstage after her last show, she laughed at herself for using it in 90 percent of her collection. "It reminded me of christenings, weddings, lingerie, funerals," she said. "All the classic feminine things I did not really like. But there was a scrap of couture lace in the studio, and somehow" --she threw up her hands--"it took over."

I know what she means. The heritage of lace, though a beguiling wonder of human skill and endeavor, is also fraught with potential taste traps. At one end, it's a dream of haute couture workmanship, and at the opposite, a nightmare of sex-shop tackiness. It's innocent, romantic, folkloric, and churchy on the one hand and straight-up fetishist on the other. Babies and brides wear lace, as do grannies and Goths. Quite where a modern woman stands vis-a-vis this tricky web of connotations is the question Prada was up against. One slight slipup in sartorial signals and, whoops, you could be a laughingstock.

To make lace look at all new--neither frumpy, nor flesh-flashy, nor revoltingly frilly--it needs to be countermanded in some bold way or other. Exactly how, though, depends on who you are. I hatched this theory after working through a vast cache of lacy blouses, shirts, dresses, and underpinnings sent to me by VOGUE . Aside from Prada, a surprising spectrum of people have used it: Givenchy, Derek Lam, Phi, Valentino, J. Mendel, Meadham Kirchhoff, Erdem. I also count Stella McCartney and Sophia Kokosalaki, because they both made intricately pieced black cutout dresses pertinent to the subject of challenging transparency, if not actually made of traditional lace. Gwyneth Paltrow wore an example of each while promoting Iron Man and was declared "Amazonian" rather than fluffy. Ergo: Lace today can denote strong femininity, something it's never done before.

"It has to be strong," says Riccardo Tisci at Givenchy. "When it gets sexy, it's vulgar"

That's certainly what ...