Boucl? jackets hit it really big but arm warmers are still stuck in a subcultural ghetto.

Boucl? is fun to say Boooooo-clay except that the ?clay? is shorter and firmer than it would be in American English.

The French-English Dictionary says it means curled or curly. (Bouclette is ringlet.)

I?m always thinking boucl? means caterpillar, but that?s chenille, another French word for a fabric that makes a point of texture. Chenille really is velvety the way some caterpillars are. Boucl? is more bumpy. It?s also extremely hot at the moment.

People always think it?s a conspiracy when 9 million designers all lock onto the same trend at once. But it?s really more the way that, when the first really nice day comes after a long winter, a lot of people just spontaneously and independently want an ice cream cone.

It just feels right: It?s a combination of feelings and past associations and something in the air.

I started picking up on the emerging hotness of boucle last summer without even realising it.

I was surrounded by these big bolts of colorful boucl? tweeds at a fabric outlet that sells mill ends.

If I?d been thinking, I would?ve realised that you only get mill ends when some manufacturer has ordered dozens of bolts and had some left over.

There wouldn?t be all these mill ends of boucle if a lot of people weren?t making something out of it for the next season. But I was shopping, not thinking.

All these boucle tweeds reminded me of the several Chanel-style suits my best friend from college had arrived with freshman year in 1963. Matching shoes and quilted, chain-handled Chanel-style bags, too.

The flower-child faded-jeans-and-no-bra thing didn?t start until the late 1960s; in the early ?60s, upper-middle-class 18-year-olds still had suits and cocktail dresses. The bolts of boucl? also reminded me that I?d been toying with the idea of making some jackets that would have fringed edges instead of hems and facings and linings.

So much easier than cutting out all those extra little pieces. Not an original idea Chanel did it in the 1950s, and Karl Lagerfeld has redone it over and over.

Fashion magazines are always pairing his frayed-edge Chanel jackets with jeans so you won?t think they?re stuffy. I bought yards of the fabric but, naturally, still haven?t gotten around to making the jackets.

Then, a couple of months ago, the JCPenney early spring catalogue showed up in the mailbox, and there was my jacket on the cover: shortish, in pink tweed, fringed at the lapels, down the front, along the hem and at the cuffs.

The model was wearing four strands of nice big pinky pearls with it, very Chanel, and a V-necked pink top and distressed-looking jeans. The weird thing: I couldn?t find this jacket anywhere inside.

I went through the catalogue three or four times, page by page. It just wasn?t in there.

It brought out my inner Nancy Drew: Why would they give this jacket the prime spot on the cover, print millions of catalogues, pay all that postage, and then not tell you how to buy the jacket?

At least according to the Penney?s PR person I asked, the Mystery of the Missing Jacket wasn?t so mysterious after all: The jacket sold so fast that, by the time the catalogue went to press, it was sold out. Gone. History. A few weeks later, Bill Cunningham?s layout of candid shots of real people in their own clothes in The New York Times Sunday Styles section was all women in and in some cases shopping for boucl? jackets, some real Chanel, some knockoffs.

Everybody?s doing them. Search for ?boucl? jacket? on Google, and you come up with 19,000 citations.

You can find new Chanel for thousands, vintage Chanel for hundreds, knockoffs in every price range.

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