There is a way of dressing that is seized upon, slaveringly, Pavlov doggie-style, by certain middle-class grown-up girl-children who were born out of a 1960s ethos, if not of the decade itself. These women are first generation offspring of the rock 'n' roll boho classes; kids who grew up reading Miffy in the Snow while lying on a bean bag and simultaneously making a mobile out of whatever was lying around champagne corks, used roaches and some of Daddy's LP covers and passed the Kool-Aid acid-test as toddlers wearing scaled-down versions of their parent's libertine prints. I call this breed the Out-Of-It Girls, embodied by 26-year-old artist, jewellery designer, occasional model and mother-of-two Jade Jagger.

Jade appeared in Hello! magazine extolling the virtuesof being a single mum (to little Assisi and Amba) living in a four-bedroom rented farmhouse in Ibiza. Jade's art (which I seem to recall involved flowers) is apparently ``rather quiet at the moment''. No, she's not doing pastel miniatures, she's just not doing anything at all.

Last year, though, Jade decided to design jewellery, and that's going rather well. She also acts as a creative consultant to the fashion designer Matthew Williamson. ``These days a muse encompasses so much more than just the woman in the background floating around in beautiful dresses.

She is a creative force as well as the feminine influence on an otherwise male-orientated business.'' Says Jade. Adjacent to this quote is a photograph of Jagger wearing a yellow swimsuit and up to her thighs in a pond. Out-Of-It Girls love being photographed in water, just adore that Botticelli Venus thing. Water has such a feminine energy.

Jemima Khan (although not quite a hippy-dippy princess, does have a mother who lent her name to the Londonnightclub that isn't Tramp) has just launched her own capsule collection of enormously expensive bias-cut dresses. Jemima claims she is doing it to shine a spotlight on Pakistani embroidery techniques, but I think she's really doing it to avoid wearing another powder blue shalwar kameez a garment that, despite featuring all the Out-Of-It Girl fashion essentials (ethnicity, wearability, unstructuredness, modesty, floaty girliness, natural fibres), even she and Diana failed to turn into a Fashion Moment.

Unlike, say, Stella McCartney (who has far too much gritty Protestant work ethic in the DNA to qualify as an Out-Of-It Girl, even if she does design definitive little OOIG frocks), there is nothing in Jemima's CV to suggest a budding career in fashion design, but this matters not a jot.

Out-Of-It Girls nearly always get involved in fashion at some point, if only because an opinion about it will have been handed down alongside their parents' jeans. For portfolio ``career'' girls like Jade and Jemima,part-time modelling segues easily into wifedom and/or motherhood, and motherhood into some sort of earthy, but not too messy, creative pastime.

``We can be what we want,'' they seem to say, but whatever they work at, it is often an un-choice born of too much freedom, the kind of arty displacement activities for apparently charmed chicklets who don't know who they are and need a lot of time and space and peace and good creative vibes to attempt to find out. ``I like being alone and having the silence,'' says Jade. ``It gives me the strength and ability to go out in the world again.''

Patsy Kensit also favours the look. No surprise really, since she is another Out-Of-It Girl with a part-time career squeezed in between full-time relationships and the raising of a desperately Kool Kidlet (dad a rock star, stepdad a rock star, mum a twentysomething actress-model-whatever on her third marriage...I wonder what Jim Kerr's son will want to be when he grows up?).

This season, the shops are a big girl'sdressing-up box stuffed full of frocks tailor-made for an expensive identity crisis. Clothes that are perfect for the ``modern'' woman on the move, but which also hark back to childhood memories of trying on mummy's Bill Gibb evening dress and turning her kaftan into a teepee during those lengthy world tours, semi-permanent school holidays and restless sojourns in foreign lands, while a transient succession of parents, step-parents, parents' lovers, nannies, siblings, step-siblings, half-siblings and hangers-on cluttered up the conversation pit with their egos and auras.

Jade Jagger describes herself as ``easy-come, easy-go'', particularly in relationships, but she would, wouldn't she? ``I didn't much like being dragged around the world when I was a kid,'' she says, before adding, as the rootless wannabe-adult often will, ``but I realise now how incredibly lucky I was to see what I saw. It taught me a lot.''

In contrast, Patsy, though the god-daughter of a Kray, grew up in the suburban sprawl nearHeathrow airport. There was never anything boho about Hounslow, much more in the way of vapour trails than hippie ditto, and so although Mrs Gallagher wears the no-fuss-with-your-frills look, she gives herself away by always appearing freshly pressed.

That's OK. Spirit of 68 meets 98's pragmatism probably means packing a travel iron alongside the good vibes and self-esteem when embarking on a meaningful interior journey.

The Observer News Service