When the fall collections were shown last February and March, the great subplot concerned that most banal of phenomena, the weather: New York was bone-chillingly cold, Milan was weirdly hot and wet, and only Paris, thankfully, delivered spring as we know it (and sing of it). For those of us who had to trek from show to show and country to country, there arose the vexed question of what to pack to be on trend and on temperature. How to wear Prada's color-blocked suede platform sandals in a northern Italy monsoon? How to show off your 3.1 Phillip Lim rosette T-shirt frock when the wind chill is arctic? We were reminded, in short, of the fundamental alignment between the cycles of fashion and the cycles of nature; and alerted, as we took in the collections, to the question of what happens to fashion when the natural seasons are no longer as predictable (or neatly cyclical) as The Farmer's Almanac once led us to believe.

Sally Singer's "Cloud Atlas" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the July 2007 issue of Vogue.

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