New book pinpoints 10 classic pieces for women

NEW YORK

f you have the choice between a trendy little track jacket and a functional trench coat this season, don't dismiss the trench as a dowdy throwback.

Trends come and go, but the trench coat is a classic that has maintained its power to bestow mystery and allure on its wearer without being overtly sexy -- think Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or Catherine Deneuve in "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg."

The trench coat, along with little black dress, the suit, jeans, the cashmere sweater, the white shirt, the high heel, pearls, lipstick and sneakers are celebrated in a new book, "The Classic Ten: The True Story of the Little Black Dress and Nine Other Fashion Favorites" (Penguin Books).

"The idea of the book came about because it was something I wanted to read but couldn't find," author Nancy MacDonell Smith says. She'd seen books about individual fashion icons but could not find a collection of fashion classics.

Smith says the 10 classics were obvious and easy to pick, although she flirted with the idea of including such garments as the white wedding dress and the bra. First on the list was the little black dress.

Chic, streamlined, sexy and elegant, the little black dress is a fashion staple that was born after World War I but has remained modern today.

Smith calls legendary designer Coco Chanel the spiritual godmother of the little black dress. It's unclear if she invented the fashion staple, as she claimed, but she certainly popularized it. Vogue called her little black dress, which debuted in 1926, the Model T of fashion.

"It is shorthand for a certain kind of style," Smith says.

That style, personified by Hepburn in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," has never really gone out of fashion, cropping up again and again as designers are newly inspired by the black Givenchy sheath Hepburn wore in the 1961 film. It is such an iconic image that when Barneys New York had the dress copied more than 30 years later, it sold out.

Another garment whose stature was helped along by Hollywood and Chanel is the suit. Marlene Dietrich's sexy, gender-bending turn in a tuxedo in the 1932 film "Morocco" made Dietrich a star and launched the popularity of suits for women. In the 1950s, Chanel came out of retirement to create her signature cardigan suit with a skirt, which became a favorite of affluent women who coveted their Chanel suits for decades.

Suits with skirts lost their glamorous luster as working women adopted them as a uniform adorned with floppy bow ties in the 1970s and 1980s, but the pantsuit remains an androgynous attention-getter. Smith compares a woman in a masculine suit to black velvet against white satin, "each element thrown into high relief."

If a suit highlights a woman's femininity by comparison, high heels take a more direct route. They lengthen legs and force calves to contract and thus appear more shapely, and they alter a woman's walk to a slower, swaying gait. Heels lost popularity among the platforms, wedges and chunky heels of the 1990s, but stilettos have made a comeback in the past few years.

"I don't think you can underestimate the power of 'Sex and the City' in popularizing them," Smith says. "And again, it's a symbol of high status. It gives this message that you don't have to take the subway, that there's a Lincoln Town Car waiting for you."

The craze has made shoe designers like Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo household names, despite the fact that their prices are far beyond the budgets of most women.

The return of the high-end high heels coincides with the renewed popularity another indulgence, the cashmere sweater.

"It was associated with a stuffy, '50s, pointy bullet bra under a twinset kind of look," Smith says.

Today's cashmere sweater isn't made for debutantes, but for stylish women. The extremely soft wool is being used in designs that are sleeker, thinner and more versatile than their preppy forebears.

"I feel like every day I get a flip book from a designer who's launching a cashmere sweater line," says Smith, who is the fashion features director for Nylon magazine. "It's a luxury but it's not an unattainable luxury."

A cashmere sweater can cost hundreds of dollars, which may be attainable but can hardly be called economical.

Jeans are a different story.

Created as work pants in the mid-19th century, jeans were adopted by teenagers in the 1950s who wanted to emulate James Dean and Marlon Brando, and became high fashion in the 1980s as Calvin Klein, Gloria Vanderbilt and others pushed "designer jeans." Today, they can be worn with everything from the most expensive designer duds and stilettos to a T-shirt and flip-flops.

"It's very American in that it's very democratic. It's something that doesn't require a lot of money but is very stylish," Smith says. "It's actually strange to spend a lot of money on them."

The most recent addition to the list, and another stylish option for budget-conscious women, is the sneaker.

"You have to include them in any modern look at style," Smith says. "But I think even 20 years ago it would have been a different story."

Sneakers have moved from the sports field to everyday life and are now offered in sleek, stylish designs that add a funky flair to jeans or even a suit.

They have become so mainstream that sneaker-averse Europeans, who could often spot American tourists by their gleaming white sports shoes, have increasingly embraced the comfortable shoes, Smith says.

"Now even Parisian women are taking the plunge," she says.