the simple life; Time for a time-out from the ladylike trend, with its lacy flourishes, jangling charms, and fancy furbelows.(personal appearance)(Column)

Byline: Sarah Mower

Sometimes a change in what you want to wear comes over you not as the mild, meandering fancy of the ordinary order but a drastic physical reaction. An attack of claustrophobia and raging impatience finished me and "ladylike" one day last winter. It was 8:15 a.m. as I was struggling to pin an outsize crystal dragonfly brooch to a vintage checked tweed coat. I was late, very late, panic-stricken late, but there I was: Left or right lapel? Up or down? Forty-five degrees or 90? Did it need another with it? Ought it to be three, for "eccentricity"? As I finally charged out of the house, trailing a purple ostrich boa and yelling excuses about traffic into my cell phone, I suddenly saw myself, as if from across the street. There goes a madwoman. Look at her. Even her bag is wearing jewelry.

A tussle had already taken place another morning when I attempted to go out in my new crushed-velvet, crewel-embroidered, fur-trimmed coat. An eleven-year-old Avril Lavigne fan caught me at the door, put a restraining hand on my arm, and enunciated, "No." I huffed and fluffed, but she was right. Overdressed, overdone, overdecorated was the mommy in the mirror. Hell. I'd lost my cool. That night, it sank in even further when Maisie and I were looking at a photo of my brother's wedding ten years ago. I was wearing a black Narciso Rodriguez bias shift and a pair of Jimmy Choo ankle straps. That's it; no jewelry. Nothing jingling, dangling, hanging off me-except that Maisie-baby laughing on my hip, her face covered in chocolate cake.

I remember the feeling of that dress: dead-plain, to the point, no-fuss, fabulous (and just about the last thing you'd choose to wear to the complicated dress-fests weddings have become these days). It brought back a surge of memories of the nineties minimalist I used to be, a woman who could run out to work with nothing more than a top, pants, a pair of sandals, and a big nylon Prada bag to slow her down. Speed-chic, we called it. Black pants and jackets by Helmut Lang. Black nylon skirts and V-necked school sweaters by Prada. Sharp shifts from Narciso and Calvin. White T-shirts from A.P.C. and Ann Demeulemeester. Oh, it worked! How we loved it!

Empires have crumbled since then, of course. "Edgy" and "cool" have withered and died; matte black is banished to the wastelands of boring. And to make the change unignorably dramatic, Helmut Lang and Jil Sander, two of the chief architects of monochrome purism, have both upped and slammed the doors on the businesses they built. This makes disturbing news for any woman, like me, who wants her minimalist mojo back. Where to look now for all that livable, casual, luxurious stuff that went totally AWOL during the reign of Lady ?

In fashion, there's never any going back, only moving on, but this season I spy hope at long last. A new kind of minimalism is asserting itself. It's just that you have to retune your eye to detect it. For a start (unthinkable ...