The big news from the Paris collections is that the hourglass figure is back. Perhaps it was the only direction the silhouette could take -- the fashionable form had become so super-skinny that it couldn't go any further without vanishing. With the preferred dress size in Hollywood recently reported as zero, we'd no doubt reached the far end of the thin, thinner, thinnest continuum.

It's interesting how long a major shift in beauty standards takes to emerge on the scene. I can remember the first rumbles of this particular phenomenon from about 10 years ago. When it comes to the female body shape, one thing we can chart with certainty is the cyclical swing back and forth from one extreme to another. Any observer of history could have predicted that the curvy look would eventually return, though it would have been hard to announce exactly when this transition would take place.

During the 20th century, each body ideal has held sway for varying lengths of time, usually several decades. The current spate of thinness began in the '60s, with the rakelike supermodels Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, though within that span of time there have been subtle variations in standards, with aerobicized muscle tone altering the ideal contours in the '70s and '80s, for example.