she's my inspiration; Today's young lions have rejected the artsy Sturm und Drang of youthful nineties fashion in favor of knowing polish and wry elegance.

Byline: Hamish Bowles

From Charles Frederick Worth on, male designers have sought an ideal woman to embody and shape their aesthetic. Worth had his wife, the comely Marie Vernet, by his side when he concocted crinolines for the court of the Empress Eugenie. Today's working muses are stylish consumers who bring inspiration to the designs of their male contemporaries; and their passion for fashion and its history is bringing a renewed sense of polish to the runways.

"You definitely get the best-dressed award today!" said the coat check at Jean Georges as Lynn Ban surrendered her straw-colored 1960s Chanel couture coat (found on eBay). Flecked with orange and lime, the coat is a serendipitous match for her shapely Prada heels. Ban is clothes-mad and has been since she stormed the Chanel boutique in Paris as a teenager, bulk-buying pastel suits and quilted purses. It is Ban's fellow Singaporean Andrew Gn who is now on the receiving end of her fashion wisdom. Although the two have known each other since childhood, their friendship took off when they both found themselves together in Paris in the early 1990s. Gn adored Ban's contemporary fashion choices-Alaia and Versace-but urged her to look to rarefied vintage. "I sort of went, 'Hmmm . . . something else to buy!' " says Ban, who soon started adding Halston, Courreges, and Pucci finds to her wardrobe.

Over the years she has refined her eye, and her Manhattan aerie, high above Central Park, is crowded with closets and rolling racks filled with hundreds of haute couture and recherche designer clothes, from Saint Laurent tuxedos and Norell sequins to Zandra Rhodes chiffons and Azzaro jerseys. For the past five years, Ban-who is also launching a multibrand accessory store in London-has turned her astute eye for fashion into a professional relationship with Gn. His Mainbocher-inspired fall collection, for example, was shown with jewels from Ban's collection of designer costume jewelry. "It sounds corny, but it's so important," says the jovial Gn, whose pan-generational clientele runs the gamut from well-groomed 20-something socialites in London and Mumbai to stylish nonagenarians in Palm Beach. "You always need a woman in designing a collection. Being a man I stretch my fantasies as far as I can, but I'm not the one who's buying the clothes!"

Paris-based Gn and Manhattanite Ban operate largely long distance. "I E-mail photographs-a detail, a photo, an object-and then we'll discuss it," says Ban. This might run the gamut from the gathers on a 1970s Halston jersey dress to the felt cutwork on an Edwardian coat. "With Andrew it's always a feeling," says Ban, "He's inspired by it, but he's always doing it in his own way and modernizing it." The two talk the same language-fashion-speak-and effortlessly complete each other's sentences. "I'm always asking Lynn, 'When can we do a Donna Karan revival from the eighties?' " Gn says. " 'When can we do Armani?' "

At home in her Milan apartment, Ban's fellow fashion muse Miki Zanini is concocting a delicious dinner for "her" designer, Lawrence Steele. Long-limbed Zanini began her career as a model and cuts a striking figure, even at home. Today, to prepare asparagus risotto, vitello tonnato, and a chocolate mousse, she is dressed in Rick Owens's trailing cocoa toga, its twisted strap pinned with antique diamond brooches. Zanini has painted her apartment walls herself with perfect bandbox stripes and hung them with portraits of Chanel and Polaroids of herself in her many chameleon guises.

Like Ban's, Zanini's intuitive fashion sense is ...