There is a new mood in the land. If, in the last year or so, you have found yourself fastening a snug coat with grosgrain ribbon, or layering strands of tulle-caged fake pearls around your neck, or wearing the tiniest cropped jacket of black lace, then you have partaken of the dramatic romanticism that characterizes what is best and most directional in fashion today. That direction points, appropriately enough, toward the moody and introspective and away from the prosaic promptings of the external world. (Gone, or going, are streetwear, logos, and random assertions of fabulousness and power.) Design is no longer about responding to "what's out there." Rather, it is about exploring feelings and aesthetic ideas, poetically: Fashion, to paraphrase Wordsworth, is now emotion recollected in tranquillity (or, if you prefer, in washed gazar).

If one were to look for the Wordsworth or Coleridge or Shelley of the new movement, a good place to start would be the seven designers who assembled for Steven Meisel's camera on the morning of the 2005 Costume Institute Ball.

"The Magnificent Seven" by Sally Singer and Mark Holgate has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the September 2005 issue of Vogue.

Click here for the full article.

Get more articles like this delivered to your door each month! Click here to subscribe today.