Summer is revealing. All year long, people?s ideas of what they need to wear are changing minutely, invisibly, in tiny increments they may not be aware of. Then it gets hot and people take off their coats, and finally you see what they?ve been thinking.

?These little girls are walking around with hardly anything on!? a middle-aged man just back from Las Vegas complained to me a couple of weeks ago. In fact, he might?ve noticed the same thing in lots of other cities.

Here?s the thing: When this man graduated from college, girls his age were wearing their skirts about the same length that men classically wear their suit jackets: two or three inches short of fingertip length, barely long enough to cover their VPLs. Bras were optional; girdles had been tossed on the great scrap heap of history. You?d think a fellow would remember that. Except that, at the time, it all seemed normal. And normal isn?t so memorable.

Fashion is like that: You can get used to anything if you see enough of it. When this man graduated from college in the late 1960s, pretty much every woman in America was wearing a miniskirt. Check out the wedding photos of brides married in 1968, and you?ll see that even their grandmothers? skirts were well above their knees ? way shorter than anything the brides themselves would wear now.

There?s less overlap now between girls and their grandmothers, fashion having exploded into a zillion fragments. What people wear varies by age, income, occupation, class, education, ethnicity, musical taste, politics, affectional preference, subculture, hobbies (especially quilting), favourite sport, you name it.

Not to whine, but it?s hard on fashion writers. Back in the day, you could make grand, magisterial proclamations and expect them to be met with some reverence: ?This fall, darlings, every woman will want a short skirt, a dramatic cape, a 6-inch-wide belt to cinch in her waist, a shoe with a skyscraper heel on a giant platform ? and everything black.?

(These are all genuine fashion trends for fall 2006 according to the pundits, in case you care, which maybe four percent of people not employed in the fashion industry do. But don?t get your hopes up: This doesn?t mean fashion is dead since, really, fashion is what actual people actually want to wear, not what various authority figures ? magazine editors, dictatorial Frenchmen or your mother ? say you ought to want.)

Now you make dramatic sweeping pronouncements and people laugh. The news that black is the new black amuses the 17-year-old Goth who hasn?t worn anything else since she was in seventh grade.

The Lilly Pulitzer fan, who wears all colour all the time, rolls her eyes and assumes you?re talking to somebody else. The size 16 who hasn?t worn a top tucked in for ages is deeply offended by your recommendation to cinch in her waist. What waist? And what if she wants to breathe?

The senior VP who sticks with Armani suits wouldn?t know what to do with a cape. And you don?t have to be on the waiting list for Leisure Village to think the giant platforms are nutty, though some of them have possibilities as sculpture. On the bright side, the fact that we all live in our own little fashion subcultures ? wholesome soccer mom or boho art student or handcrafted art-to-wear fan or hard-charging exec or hip-hop princess or gym bunny or country club conservative, etc. ? at least preserves our capacity to be shocked, amazed, amused or entertained by the way folks from outside our bubbles dress.

The man who was dismayed by the Vegas teenagers in barely-there halter tops and crop Ts and short shorts and miniskirts is used to seeing people in billowy khakis and golf shirts and blue blazers and, when they?re feeling uproarious, splashy Hawaiian shirts. All the women he knows own a million pair of black pants. Against that background, crop tops and minis naturally look astonishing.

It?s the same reason people who typically buy trousers to fit their actual waist sizes continue to be amazed by young men who wear their jeans big enough to fall down and long enough to puddle up around their feet. The hip-hop giant-pants trend is more than 20 years old, but if you spend most of your life in a non-hip-hop bubble, you don?t see enough of it to get used to it. So, on the rare occasion when you run into a young man who?s wearing his jeans waistband just under his butt ? the same place the hems of miniskirts hit in 1970, coincidentally ? your eyes pop. It?s a curious development: Under the hip-hop protocol, trousers have evolved from a garment intended to cover the male body from the waist down to a garment meant to cover the legs only. Hip-hop jeans are the new legwarmers, so to speak. Which is pretty radical, even if it is old news.

This summer, The Wall Street Journal ran a gee-whiz story about young miscreants frustrated in their attempts to commit crimes or escape from crime scenes by their unmanageably oversized pants. It stitched together a collection of police reports in which giant pants at some crucial moment started to fall down and caused a wannabe criminal to drop the loot, or fell all the way down and tripped him up, or snagged on top of a fence he was scrambling over and left him hanging by his ankles ? or, in one case, caught fire, fell down and tripped him. (Lesson: Never put a lighted cigarette in your pocket.)

It?s more proof (if more were needed) that fashion isn?t dead: If it were, you wouldn?t see people risking everything to look the way they think they should. These treacherous pants deserve a place in the fashion victims? hall of fame, along with Isadora Duncan?s scarf and Ben Stiller?s zipper from ?Something About Mary? and the hoop skirts that got tangled in the works of 19th-century mills. (And don?t forget the man who fell into the machinery in the eyeglass factory and made a spectacle of himself.)

@EDITRULE:Write to Patricia McLaughlin c/o Universal Press Syndicate, 4520 Main St., Kansas City, MO 64111 or patsy.mcl