Many fashion designers, you may have noticed, are squeamish about breasts. They prefer boyish waif bodies or a tolerable B-cup — largely on the grounds that the clothes hang better. With obvious exceptions like the body-conscious designs of Azzedine Alaïa, their clothes almost seek to neutralize the female form.

Meanwhile, the demand for padded bras and breast implants, and the popularity of shows like “Mad Men,” suggest that women like a kind of reconstructed femininity. They want hips and breasts, phony or not.

Two designers, Miuccia Prada and Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton, really captured that appetite this season, and with a style that was deliberately unnatural looking. Natural would be a minimalist beige tunic or maybe a jacket with a gently nipped waist that you could wear with a skirt or a pair of khakis. With those styles, the objective is to look purposeful and energetic. And how many women would quarrel with that?

The fall ready-to-wear collections continued their clean sweep as Stella McCartney sent out linear coats with only a little notch in the front for a detail and crewnecks and slacks so plain and simple, you had to remind yourself you weren’t looking at Ann Taylor.

Give the retail chain six months to catch up.

That’s how long it took for Phoebe Philo’s first Céline show, last October, to have an influence. Ms. Philo isn’t the only designer who likes simplified clothes. Indeed, Ms. McCartney’s spring clothes had the same attitude. But Ms. Philo’s ability to give Céline a look makes her the equivalent of a yardstick. Suddenly, it seems, everybody is using her strict measure as the rule.

Ms. McCartney’s collection was super clean, with V-neck tunics and skinny wool pants, sleeveless wool coats, mini-shifts and graphic uses of color amid the neutrals, like a cropped sleeveless jacket in burnt-orange wool over a salmon turtleneck.