dress by anonymous; A chic little number from Who Can Guess Who is what we all want now.(works of Duro Olowu)

About a year ago, when Duro Olowu dreamed up a floaty, free-spirited silk dress referencing both louche seventies London and his Lagos heritage, little did he know what would follow in its wake. The dress went global, literally: A British vacationer saw it on a friend in New York and ordered one on her cell phone before she'd even returned home; another woman, an American, read about the dress in the November 2004 issue of Vogue on a flight to London, and sped to Olowu's OG2 store in Notting Hill the second she cleared customs. To date, Olowu has sold 1,000-and counting-of those $900 dresses.

One-thousand-and-counting women can't be wrong. And when was the last time so many voted so vociferously for a piece from a designer who was, to all intents and purposes, barely a blip on the fashion radar? A designer with only the most limited availability in the United States?

The phenomenon can be explained if you consider the Olowu case to be a bellwether of this spring's sleeper hit: the Anonymous Dress. Women are snapping up dresses from little-known designers, right now, exactly because something that doesn't announce its origins is more alluring. Why? Because fashion has become so endlessly documented and marketed that by the time you get around to wearing the most-photographed looks, they have already been seen by half the known world in a half-dozen glossy magazines.

The anonymous nature of these dresses doesn't mean they are bland. This is not about a basic little black number that needs a lot of personalization. This season's Anonymous Dress might wrap and fold in a weighty jersey printed with leaves or feathers (Issa); come encrusted with tarnished metallic paillettes (Isabela Capeto); be cut empire-line with an intricately gathered neckline (Sari Gueron); or be worn back to front, turning a scooped back into a decollete that just stops short of being indecent (Costello Tagliapietra). Anonymity doesn't have to preclude individuality or imagination.

What all the best Anonymous Dresses have in common is an instantly recognizable fashion validity. They will work in 101 different situations. "Women have realized that whatever else they own, a beautiful, charming dress will always look right," says the Brazilian designer Capeto. As for Ikram Goldman, who owns the Ikram store in Chicago, her Duro Olowu dress performs a singular role-even though its origins are no longer quite so mysterious. "It gives me a pleasure that I can't derive from any other piece," she says. "I look good, I feel comfortable, and I stand out without looking flashy."

Women have become vocal in their support of the Anonymous Dress, and proactive in seeking it out. Much of its success has been due to a conspiratorial, word-of-mouth,that's-fantastic-where-did-you-get-it? exchange of information. Names of designers and addresses of stores have been hastily scrawled on cocktail napkins or brunch receipts or a random piece of paper passed on at the school door. We're in a throwback moment to more ...