destination stockholm; In a season of coolly exuberant prints, no one does it better than the Swedes.

Byline: Sally Singer

Miuccia Prada may have described it as Japanese; Proenza Schouler may have believed themselves to be channeling Hawaii; and all at Marni may have invoked Marimekko (Finland) and Vera (America). But watching the models go by in New York, Milan, and Paris in simple sheaths and A-line ensembles blissfully combined with playfully graphic florals, all I could think of was Sweden. True, I had never set foot there; but I had traveled extensively in www.svenskttenn.se, the web site of the legendary Stockholm housewares emporium Svenkst Tenn, which confirmed my impression that here was a country under the aesthetic rule of Josef Frank, the architect and interiors designer who (a) famously gave us austere box houses furnished with rugs and sofas hugely ablaze with flowers, vegetables, and tropical birds; and (b) in my view summed up the underlying principle of spring 2005 fashion when he grumpily said, in 1927, "Our furniture and our things have nothing to do with the shape of the house." So I flew to Stockholm and dragged Lars Nilsson with me.

Nilsson, whose mother hails from a part of Sweden where men wear red pompoms and grim expressions-get it? that's the juxtaposition we're talking about-is something of a Frank fanatic. The Nina Ricci designer grew up in a home where Frank prints appeared on dinner trays, table linens, and draperies: And so, in his Paris kitchen, Nilsson's curtains are in Frank's blue-brown Rox & Fix design ("Very masculine," he notes). When he was designing Bill Blass, Nilsson used Frank's Vegetable Tree and La Plata prints in cocktail dresses, evening coats, and handbags; and for Nina Ricci, his florals always carry a lovely echo of the Viennese-born master. "I love the bold prints," he said, looking at the textiles tumbling down Svenskt Tenn's walls, "and the very refined mix of colors."

Accompanied by a local pop star (Lisa Milberg, the drummer from the Concretes) and a local fashion star (model Erika Wall), Nilsson took me on a whirlwind ...