Looks like the world ? or anyway the world of fashion ? may not be going to hell in a hand basket after all. And, not to wander from the point so early in the game, but why is it always a hand basket? Couldn't the world go to hell just as well in a laundry basket or a waste basket or a peach basket? Why should the hell-bound be so hell-bent on alliteration? And what's a hand basket, anyway?

Whatever, the good news, according to many recent trend stories, is that teens are wearing less teensy clothes. And not because their mums begged or bribed them to, but because it's the cool thing now. Last summer it was all about skin, bared by Britneyesque low-rider jeans cut down to there, and midriff tops cut up to here. The look was all surface provocation, and it made 12-year-olds look old before their time.

A few weeks ago, in a class I was teaching, the students ? most of them college seniors or juniors majoring in fashion design or fashion marketing ? were complaining in scandalised tones about the way-too-sexy ways their little sisters had been dressing. (And behaving, too, but that's another column.)

"They are so bad!" one young woman said, sounding genuinely shocked, and more than a little like my mother. Another reported the sighting, on a recent mall crawl, of a miniskirt that was mere inches long. Still another allowed that, when she'd been their age, she too had been a rebel, with blue hair, multiple piercings, etc. But, she pointed out, dressing like a punk doesn't get you in serious trouble the way dressing like a hooker can, especially when you're 12.

The tone of teen fashion had diverged so far from what, until recently, were generally accepted standards of public decorum that just describing the clothes could get you in trouble. When I sent an e-mail to a Gap spokesperson asking her to comment on the backlash, and pasted in several recent stories from The New York Times ? The New York Times! ? the e-mail wouldn't go through Gap Inc.'s decency filter. It kept bouncing back with this notice:

"The following message could not be delivered to the intended recipient(s) because it violates the Gap Inc. offensive language policy."

The philosopher Oscar de la Renta once pointed out, on the subject of hemlines, that they can only move in two directions, and can only go so far in each one: Once they go up as far as they can, they have to come down; there's no place else for them to go. That may explain as well as anything why showing too much skin is suddenly so last year.

It's been done. It's over.

But let's hope there's more to it.

When people talk about what clothes mean, they're usually interested in how you use your clothes to tell people who you are ? or who you want them to think you are. It's at least half the reason the Amish wear their distinctive plain clothes, soldiers wear uniforms and so on: to remind themselves that they've chosen a particular identity and committed themselves to certain behaviours.

Kids and young adults are more likely to use clothes to "try on" identities. Adolescence, says Joe Kelly, author of 'Dads and Daughters: How to Inspire, Understand, and Support Your Daughter When She's Growing Up So Fast', "is about experimenting with who you are and who you want to be ? and part of identity is experimenting with how you present yourself to the world and to yourself."

What distresses Kelly about the streetwalker-wannabe look isn't that it's about sex ? because it isn't, he says. It's pure titillation, which isn't the same thing. It's hype.

So what are girls telling themselves ? about who they are and what their possibilities are ? when they look in the mirror and see a steamy junior version of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera?

Socrates, if I remember, believed that values could be inculcated by providing children with "experiential knowledge of the good". The idea, roughly, is that you make them behave whether they want to or not when they're young, and eventually, they learn to value ethical behaviour by directly experiencing its goodness.

I wonder whether, maybe, experiential knowledge of the cheesy can also teach you to infer and value the good. Maybe it's wishful thinking, but maybe the experience of dressing in a way that's crassly explicit creates a longing for something better. From sensing its absence, can you infer the possibility of beauty?

Lately Irma Zandl and other members of her consulting firm, Zandl Group, have "observed a real hunger for beauty in people's lives". Zandl sees it "as partly a countertrend to so much of the sleaze and brutality currently in our culture, from Janet Jackson to Abu Ghraib".

How it happens is mysterious, but it's clear that how people feel about things as different as Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners ends up changing the way all sorts of things ? clothes included ? look to us.

Zandl thinks we're experiencing "sleaze fatigue". So a style that, last year, looked daring and dangerous and transgressive ? to 13 and 14-year-olds, if not to you ? now looks unappealing. Suddenly it's just tacky and tawdry. Because now you want the opposite of sleaze, the antidote to it. Zandl offers the example of Sofia Coppola, who wore flat shoes and a pretty, not at all flashy Marc Jacobs dress to the Academy Awards: "As a beauty ideal, (she) looks so much fresher than Britney Spears, who's looking awfully tired and worn out."

In fashion, Zandl sees "a more girlie look emerging, as well as a more buttoned-up, preppy look". And she says "it isn't just teens: Young adults are shopping for more elegant looks."

She sees this same pervasive hunger for beauty reflected in popular TV shows that teach you how to beautify your home and garden, in advertising that's more elegant and less in-your-face, even in the design of stores like the "spectacular" new Bloomingdale's in Soho or the new Whole Foods store in the recently opened Time Warner Building in New York.

"Offering beauty is like giving us a spa for our eyes," she says.

And just as ugliness gives rise to a hunger for beauty, seeing way too much skin for too long makes you want to cover up. A recent story by New York Times fashion reporter Ruth La Ferla ? her third in the past four months on the new modesty ? was illustrated with a photo of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, muffled from wrist to ankle. Both looked adorable ? which is their job, after all ? one in a long-sleeved turtleneck and a long swirl of pink skirt, the other in a long-sleeved shirt and loose ivory trousers.

Jackets are said to be selling again, and waistlines are creeping upward. The new thing, instead of a T-shirt that shows your belly, is a T-shirt that shows a T-shirt in a different colour layered under it. You'll still see itsy-bitsy miniskirts on the street, but knee-length looks newer.

It's kind of unfair. Today I passed a young woman on the street and marvelled at the brevity of her skirt, which wasn't much longer than a bathing suit. Here's the unfairness: She was somehow persuaded that she ought to buy a skirt like that ? and now that she's made the investment, she stands to be patronised in two different ways: first, for wearing a skirt that you'd expect to see on a streetwalker, and second, for wearing a skirt that marks her as someone who's slightly behind the fashion curve.

She's a double fashion victim, and she doesn't even know it yet. But she will.