What roles could the actors Fred Ward, who appeared in "The Player," and David Thewlis, the award-winning star of "Naked," be playing in their stacked shoes, shrunken jackets and elephantine trousers?

The sequence of flower-printed styles included shorts with shrunken jackets and a bra with a brief skirt.

Standouts include shrunken jackets and tissue-thin cashmere sweaters.

His Pee-wee Herman silhouette, with shrunken jackets and high-water pants, has been much copied.

Adventurous types paired their mariner shirts with shrunken jackets, drainpipe jeans or pencil skirts.

At Giorgio Armani, this trend was symbolized by shrunken jackets shaped and cropped almost to kidney height, the shape of undergarments favored by 15th-century Italian aristocrats.

At MaxMara, it was the combination of fluid skirts and dresses in jersey or chiffon with shrunken jackets and filmy baby-doll tops that struck the right note.

A shrunken jacket in a tropical weight gray wool came with a ruched bubble skirt - how else to treat such a conservative fabric?

Ms. Jovovich said at Bice, preening in a safari-style jacket seemingly shrunken to child's size.

But the short, almost shrunken jackets crowding the fall 2005 runways have other historical antecedents that predate Pee-wee's arrival on his bicycle.