Fashion? We'll always say Paris.

PARIS - As we replace boxy silhouettes with tailored cuts, trendy items with classic staples, and loud accessories with the well-placed accoutrement, our fashionable eyes turn to Paris.

While the big runway shows wrapped up Sunday with South Philadelphia-born Ralph Rucci's ready-to-wear line ending the designer collections, even more important is Market Week, now in full swing, where buyers from boutiques across the globe try to find the hottest European clothing and accessories for their stores.

Manayunk-based designer Paula Hian will be here until Friday hosting appointments with buyers. Center City boutique owners Joan Shepp and daughter Ellen, as well as Saks buyer Lisa Korn, of the Bala Cynwyd store, are here to keep appointments with major fashion brands such as Dries Van Noten and Stella McCartney.

"It's a real education," Shepp says of the Paris fashion scene. "Every time I come I learn something different. Sometimes it translates into my store. Sometimes it doesn't."

"I just love the feeling of the streets and I love the mood," Hian said from her showroom in the Westin, blocks from the center of Fashion Week festivities at Le Carrousel du Louvre.

"There is a certain [creative] energy. It's a feeling of excellence. When you are in Paris, you know you are in Paris, and Paris does not change."

Yet, fashion is on the cusp of change.

Our slow movement away from casual everything to appropriately dressy is proof, style watchers say, that we are striving to go back to a time more demure, delicate and sophisticated. Some even say the prominence of Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, is a throwback to the exuberant hope of the days of John F. Kennedy.

That was a time when people dressed up to travel and women wore pantyhose in public. Parisian designers dictated fashion to America, especially through Jacqueline Kennedy, who made a stylish name for herself wearing Christian Dior, Coco Chanel and Oleg Cassini.

Two types of fashionistas are now emerging - those who want to look like celebrities all the time, and those who long for the time when fashion was an art.

"Milan is about luxury, New York is so very commercial, and London is cheaply on the cutting edge," said David Wolfe, an expert with the Doneger Group, a New York fashion consulting company. "But Paris? Paris is about Fashion with a capital F."

Hian stopped showing under New York's Bryant Park tents two years ago in an effort to get more international exposure. She arrived in Paris last week to present her fall 2008 collection, comprising for the most part architecturally inspired coats, dresses and jumpsuits in metallic and black blocks of color - think modern looks from the 1970s.

King of couture Ralph Rucci decided last year to show both his haute couture and ready-to-wear collections in Paris alone. Rucci is a quiet designer, whose bread and butter is dressing society women in luxe sables, rich cashmeres and silk jerseys.

It is this style that blends the French sensibilities of keen tailoring, streamlined fit, plush fabrics, and hand-stitched detailing - never including items dripping with Swarovski crystals that we'll see more of in boutiques and department stores starting this spring.

Forecasters say the momentum will carry us into fall, when there will be a focus on women's waistlines with a modern-day twist combining cinched waists with belts and corsets. Pants will have higher waistlines and be cuffed and pleated; crisp white shirts with perfectly placed darts will be tucked in.

Men will continue to wear ultra-fitted suits. "It's as if they [French designers] can look into the future," said Marcos Vargas, owner of Senor in Manayunk. The menswear boutique carries European brands Emanuel Ungaro and Ermenegildo Zegna, as well as Jean-Charles de Castelbajac.

"People are sick and tired of the oversized, urban look, and that's so even here in Philadelphia," Vargas said from his Manayunk store. "People want their clothes fitted more like Kanye [West]. That's European."

Paris Fashion Week has always been a much more reserved affair than its New York counterpart - no onlookers and wannabes cramming into in-your-face tents. Instead, the bulk of the shows are basically hidden in an underground section of the Louvre called the Carrousel.

While there was front-row celebrity action - Kate Betts and Julianne Moore at Yves Saint Laurent, Twiggy and Kanye West at Stella McCartney, and Mary-Kate Olsen at Giambattista Valli - it wasn't overbearingly nouveau riche. Reserved, but not without entitlement. Yes, Vogue editor Anna Wintour and her daughter were spotted being driven along the Rue de Rivoli.

The movement is just as much about classic as about fit.

"These young girls who think that Britney Spears is the best of American fashion have a lot to learn," said Paula Thomas, a British-born California designer whose line of womenswear has a punk-rock spin. "We are moving away from that now. Paris is where it's at at the moment."

New York-based consultant Roger Joseph agrees.

"In America you get lost in the fact that Lindsay Lohan is wearing a jacket," Joseph says. "Here, it doesn't matter who is wearing it. You focus on the craftsmanship, and the jacket stands alone as a wonderful jacket."

In the last five years, several Fashion Weeks have emerged. Los Angeles has a week, as do India, China and Dubai. But it is Paris, designers say, where they get the most exposure and where buyers from all over converge.

Chan Luu is a Los Angeles designer whose line of delicate jewelry is carried in several local boutiques, including Joan Shepp and Third Street Habit. She pointed out that while Paris was never forgotten, it wasn't as much in the forefront. But even now, as the dollar plunges to a historic low against the euro, it's still busy.

"Anybody that wants to be global must come here," Luu said.

Despite the trend toward classic, the most notable part of fashions shown here is the unabashed creativity.

That may explain why dazzling presentations by fashion power hitters Balenciaga, Christian Dior, and Jean Paul Gaultier are sometimes outlandish and completely unwearable in their runway state. This season, Riccardo Tisci's work for Givenchy was full of skinny-pants, black goth looks that, if worn as suggested by the designer, have the potential to scare coworkers.

Karl Lagerfeld dressed unnaturally pale models in his well-tailored tweed suits with skirts that surprisingly had midcalf hemlines.

Jean-Charles de Castelbajac showed a collection of brightly colored, sparkling, detailed shifts against a backdrop of red and white polka dots. His models wore the equivalent of clown makeup. The clothes were well-tailored, but there was nothing practical about the show. Nothing.

That is not his concern.

"I'm a unique person," he said to a group of camera-flashing fashion journalists backstage after his show. "I create a universe that includes all of the things I love. I am an artist. I am not a fashion designer."

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