There’s a feature in this month’s Vogue about Rodarte, the fashion house led by sisters Kate and Laura Mulleavy.  They make singular, ephemeral garments that look as if they could be ripped off a girl by a good gust of wind.  The ones I’ve seen in person don’t seem tailored so much as assembled: from strips of leather, twists of fabric, feathers, baubles and trim.  And they don’t seem to be fitted to a woman’s body so much as wrapped around it and pinned in place.  (What does it feel like to wear one these dresses?)  The article praises the designers for their unusually artistic perspective and for building a thriving business in Los Angeles, at a distance from the media frenzy of New York.

Their current collection looks to Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings for inspiration.  In its palette of shimmering, impossible-to-name golds, greens and blues, it’s faithful to the artist’s blooms and skies.  The dresses are all immaculately, inventively cut, and stunningly pretty.  And maybe that’s why I can’t, like the editors at Vogue, simply fall in love with the clothes.  They go down easy.  They don’t get at the crazy life in Van Gogh’s canvases; they simply adopt their colors and images.  Some dresses literally reuse parts of the canvases (sunflowers, a night sky) as prints.  The most successful outfits mix solid-colored pieces with evocative silhouettes to capture some of the graphic dynamism of the paintings.  But no garment gets at their raw physicality or emotionalism.  They’re drowned out in loveliness.

File under “Wish I’d Kept Mine."  It’s socially acceptable now, for the first time in fifteen years, for women to wear plaid flannel shirts.  (Although it seems that they never fell out of fashion in some parts.)  It’s not the first time that I can remember a trend from its most recent incarnation (neons, boyfriend jeans, camouflage), but it’s the first time a trend seems to have returned so quickly, and in a virtually identical form.  Maybe the fabric and fit in the new flannel shirts are more sophisticated, but they look like the same flannel shirts we were wearing in 1992.  That was when Vogue published their iconic "grunge” spread, featuring a glammed-down Naomi Campbell and a Goth-punk Kristin Mcmenamy (curiously prefiguring Lisbeth Salander) lounging around a meadow in drab, unformed dresses and knits.

In an essay in last month’s Vanity Fair Kurt Andersen laments that our style evolution has stalled.  People today, he says, are wearing the same clothes, listening to the same music, and driving the same cars they did twenty years ago.  The circuits of progress have somehow gotten jammed.  At the same time cycles of fashion design, production and media have become accelerated, our way of dressing has also changed.  Fashion now is less about dressing in a prescribed look from head to toe than than about assembling an outfit from specially-curated individual pieces.  So, for a lady, the return of the plaid flannel shirt isn’t about grunge, but about finding the perfect plaid flannel shirt for herself and knowing what jeans and boots to wear it with.  And it’s about holding onto that shirt so that the next time it comes back into fashion she’ll be ready.