Let's Go America!(shopping habits of Estelle and Agathe Born)

Byline: editor: Tonne Goodman MARK HOLGATE

Two European chicsters shop our shores and explain how to be style- and dollar-conscious.

Yeah, that's it; that's the one!" The British-born, Brooklyn-based singer Estelle, known only by her first name and for her huge hit "American Boy," was recently browsing in H&M in SoHo in New York when a striped sleeveless dress, priced at $49.90, caught her eye. She instantly recognized it; Michelle Obama had worn it to a campaign rally in Detroit, and she liked that potential First Ladies had no qualms about shopping on the cheap. That Sunday afternoon, though, she picked out a $39.90 prim purple silk dress with a faux patent leather belt. With a narrow waist and full skirt, it wasn't a million miles away from the kind of look Oscar de la Renta excels at whipping up. Estelle would likely wear it to a music-industry party because, she said, laughing, "While everyone else would have their boobs out, I'd look like a fifties housewife."

That Estelle instantly recognized the Obama dress tells us a couple of things: A) Everyone, everywhere, no matter her profile, has embraced the idea that low cost and high style are not mutually exclusive, and B) the global saturation of fast-fashion brands means that anyone, anywhere, can identify just about any piece of clothing from said brands with a near-perfect success rate. Which raises the question: What's the real value of shopping inexpensively now? The answer is pretty interesting when put to Europeans, who are long- and well versed in the art of bargain huntingeven if from very different perspectives.

Typically, for an English girl like Estelle, raised on the likes of the relentlessly trend-driven Topshop, low-priced fast fashion is as useful to express her style as any of the designer namesFendi, Stella McCartney, Pierre Hardyshe experiments with. She'll add directional pieces that cost very little to her wardrobe, like the short black ribbed sweater dress she also bought from H&M for $59.90, which nods to the prevailing eighties-inflected mood of hard-edged body-con. (Though, like most everyone else, she also goes to megabrands to provide her with basicsbulk-buying jeans from Ralph Lauren and Levi's or $29.90 merino-wool sweaters from Uniqlo. "Anyone who spends $600 on a simple black tee," she comments drily, "is just trying to prove how expensive they are.")

Parisian writer Agathe Born represents the flip side of the Euro approach to inexpensive, global-saturation labels. Like many continental Europeans, she shops very little, so whatever she chooses has to fulfill a couple of easy-in-theory, exhausting-in-practice criteria: Is it absolutely, utterly perfect in every waycut, proportion, color? And does she really, really have to have it? "Honestly, I feel a bit bored with consuming," says Born. "I want to feel that I can have, and enjoy, things for years." For instance, she has developed a yen for Hellenic-looking gold rings from Ilias Lalaounis that sell for a[logical not]1,000 and up; Born reasons that they cost as much as designer clothing and will last a whole lot longer.

A survey of the closet in her cozy apartment on the Left Bank is a quick study in how French Women Don't Overshop. Everything has to earn its placebe it a 1998 Yves Saint Laurent haute couture brown crocodile jacket or a crisp white men's Zara shirt that is hanging beneath a Chanel couture LBD simply because they work together so well. She likes men's shirts, and clearly they don't have to be from Charvet; she has started to buy ...