The fall fashion magazines keep getting thicker but how many shoppers really care what they say? I dragged a big canvas bag full of fashion magazines along on my summer vacation. It felt like lugging bricks, and every time I lifted it, I wondered whether my sense of duty was misplaced.

The August and September issues round up what their editors see as fall?s hot trends. Some years, it seems, where?re only one or two. It?s all long coats and boot cut pants, or else A-shape dresses with matching coats, or twinsets and A-line skirts, or miniskirts and crop tops, or whatever.

Which makes for a ridiculously low ratio of news per pound. This fall, at least, there are more trends than you can shake a charge card at.

Bow blouses and tailored shirts and vests and slightly shrunken jackets and twinsets. Pencil skirts and swingy skirts and knee-length skirts and long skirts. Baggy pants and skinny pants. Brooches and reptile bags and little fur pieces and flingy ponchos. Ballet flats and round-toed high-heeled shoes and tweed shoes and all sorts of boots and fishnet stockings. Tweeds and tartans and boucles and argyles and leopard spots and bright colours.

Daytime glitter and satin and sequins and lace and ribbons and bows and real honest-to-God ball gowns. Serious makeup and big hair and done hair and big done-up hair.

Dressing like a socialite and dressing like a movie star and dressing like a secretary and dressing like a boy. And probably a few more. It?s a little dizzy-making. To look on the bright side: There are plenty of choices out there. You ought to be able to look as you please.

I could be reading too much into it, but it made me wonder whether the pashas of Seventh Avenue having learned they couldn?t tell women what to wear, and then having learned that shoppers don?t like it when everything looks the same have abandoned their search for what used to be fashion?s holy grail: the season?s One Big Look.

If they haven?t, they?d better: Nobody wants One Big Look anymore. Once, it was all people wanted. The whole idea was to figure out what the big look was and get it. (?It?s what they?re wearing this season, dear.?)

Way back in the dim past, when I interned at Vogue, my job was to pull a group of oracular quotes out of each issue in advance of publication so we could send them out to stores, so they could put them in their windows and in their advertising ?Vogue says: ?The clean white shirt is the freshest, most delicious look in the world!?? so shoppers everywhere could knuckle under and do what Vogue told them to.

This was in the late 1960s, when even people?s own mothers couldn?t persuade them to wear bras, not to mention slips, and couldn?t talk them out of shortening their skirts by indecent amounts.

So you can imagine how much attention they paid when a mere magazine tried to order them around. I didn?t see the connection at the time.

I look back now and think, wow, I was beating my head against a wall and I didn?t even notice. Not that anybody else in the business was noticing, either. They kept telling people what to wear, but fewer people paid attention.

The pashas of Seventh Avenue only made things worse when they started turning the crank faster, hoping to render the last season?s styles obsolete so shoppers would buy new.

For instance, this is the third or fourth or fifth season in the past ten or 15 years when leopard has been heralded as the latest thing all over again. Eventually, the fashion oracles seemed to be talking mostly to each other.

Years later, when I covered Fashion Week in New York for the first time, I was startled at how many of the pros in attendance buyers, stylists, fashion press, etc. were clanking around in faux (and sometimes real) Chanel.

Chain-handled handbags, ropes of fake pearls and gold chains, tweedy jackets with gold chains weighting their hems and pin-on faux gardenias.

Fashion was having a Chanel moment, and it was the duty of every serious fashionista to hop onto the bandwagon. These ladies had seen their duty and they?d done it. This hop-to mentality was one of the things that rubbed more and more people the wrong way about fashion. Some years ago, the novelist Susanna Moore told a reporter that she hated fashion because it seized on her favourite things and ruined them by getting everybody else to wear them, too.

Now that attitude is beginning to be the default. The minute something begins to look like a Big Look i.e., something they?ve seen in eight different magazines people who are paying attention start to feel a little bit embarrassed about wearing it. They don?t want to look as if they?re only wearing something because everybody else is, or because some magazine told them to. For example, we?ve been having another Chanel moment lately, this time embodied by the tweed jacket with ravelling fringed edges worn with jeans or almost anything but a matching skirt.

But on the hordes at Bryant Park for the recent unveiling of the clothes for Spring 2005, I saw only one of those jackets. Only one. Well, at least up until the Michael Kors show, when I could?ve hit at least four of them with spitballs from my seat in the next-to-last row. And then, an hour later, designer Douglas Hannant actually showed them tailored tweed jackets edged in self-fringe on the runway. It?s rare that something you saw in the J.C. Penney?s catalogue less than six months ago turns up on a runway at Bryant Park.

But maybe that?s the future of fashion. When pretty much everything?s out there all at once, you can hardly expect much in the way of newness. Maybe it?s time to give up on it altogether. All this raises the question: Now that people can wear anything they want pink hair, 1950s sundresses, motorcycle boots, ladylike tweed suits and now that the last thing they want is to wear what everybody else is wearing, what do they need fashion magazines for? Shopping.

Now people read fashion magazines the way they read catalogues. It?s why Lucky, a fashion magazine that works like a catalogue, has been such a hit. (Now there are wannabees: Shop, Cargo, Vitals.) To fashion writers who used to think they could call the tune, you?d think this might seem like a demotion, but Mark Holgate, writing in September Vogue, sounded quite cheerful about it.

?Today?s media blitz of fashion information,? he wrote, ?has helped (consumers) dress with individuality and elan.? The idea is: Shoppers leaf through magazines, check out runway shows on TV or online, watch makeover shows on the Style network, shop boutiques and department stores and mass merchants and vintage and thrift shops and eBay. They pick out the things that speak to them and put them together the way a good cook makes soup by taste. A little of this, a lot of that, a pinch of something else.

A beautifully detailed Davidow suit jacket from 1953, a pair of stretch corduroy jeans from Gap, a skinny Three Dots T-shirt, last year?s Chuck Taylor All Stars high-tops, a Mexican oilcloth tote bag. And then you close your eyes and concentrate: What flavour is missing? A string of graduation pearls? A broomstick-pleated metallic scarf? A pair of mango-coloured crocheted lace gloves? A Chanel gardenia on the lapel? A Vote-as-if-your-life-depended-on-it button?

? Next week: Dressing this way is fine, even fun, for many shoppers. But it?s a fashion emergency for the people who make and sell the clothes.

@EDITRULE: