Debra Pickett

In an era when American women are getting larger and larger, and plus-size fashions are getting more and more attention, was there some kind of secret, underground campaign to bring back tiny, unforgiving pants? Are skinny women rebelling against the playing-field-leveling powers of the universally flattering boot cut jean?

Seasonal signals

It happens every autumn, during what we once thought of as "back to school" season and now has evolved into a migratory series of "Fashion Weeks" around the globe. One ridiculous item -- the poncho, the flannel wool capri -- comes to symbolize a year's worth of bad judgment and false hopes.

Occasionally, and without explanation, this item -- Ugg boots, anyone? -- will become a genuine phenomenon, a trend that defies its own silliness and takes root with otherwise sensible people who promised themselves last time -- tapered leg jeans -- that they would never again buy into the hype.

Every season, every fashion magazine runs the same story, the one that advises you to buy only classic clothes, to avoid trends and stick with what's comfortable and flattering for you. Every woman reads that story. And promptly ignores it.

Because, surrounded as it is by a zillion pages of glossy, fabulous pictures of glossy, fabulous models, the follow-your-own-instincts article feels like a lie.

Or worse: a copout.

We don't want to admit that fashion -- or music, or trendy cuisine, or broadcast television -- has passed us by. It's a marketing-driven world, and if we're not buying what the magazine ads are selling, we're not really in the swing of things anymore. One day, you're deciding that skinny pants are hopelessly unkind to your hips, and then, before you know it, you're on the couch watching the network news, wondering why all the commercials are pitching pharmaceuticals and adult diapers.

It's a slippery slope from classic clothes to an elastic waistbanded life and, from there, to the modern American equivalent of death: consumer irrelevance.

Fashion, like sex and fat, is apparently very different in Europe.

It is both more artful and more connected to daily life. It is less obsessed with youth and more broadly embraced as a legitimate form of personal expression. And, somehow, weirdly, despite the annoying truism that French women do not, in fact, get fat, European fashions tend to be designed to suit a variety of right-around-average body types, rather than simply those at the smallest end of the spectrum.

(In America, even our plus-size clothes are simply larger versions of stuff originally designed for tiny bodies. How else would one explain leather miniskirts in size 22?)

'Lifelike' models?

In this spirit of tasteful realism, models with body-mass index ratios below 18 -- 125 pounds for a 5-foot-9-inch woman -- were banned from the runways at Fashion Week in Madrid. And other European cities have threatened to follow suit, insisting on healthier -- the phrase "more lifelike" comes to mind -- bodies to show off the clothes people will be wearing this season as they drive fuel-efficient cars and eat small, well-balanced meals.

This sort of rule-making is, of course, profoundly un-American. We're not the sort of country to tell people what they can and can't do with their bodies -- except, ahem, in certain areas -- and we're certainly not in the business of censoring what consumers see on the open market. If designers want to show clothes on stick figures or dead movie stars or barely recovered junkies, well, who are we to stop them?

The fatter we get, the skinnier we aspire to be. Or maybe it's vice versa.

So we worship our skinny models and their skinny pants, even as we grumble about the unattainable standard they set for the rest of us.

But, in the back of our minds, we wonder if maybe those wacky Europeans aren't doing something right, after all. There do seem to be a lot more people over there comfortably fitting into the skinny black pant.