WITH THE PUNISHING worldwide recession unofficially over, this week?s Paris Prêt-à-Porter rejoiced with unabashed ebullience evident in every designer?s show from Akris to Vionnet.

For two years, consumers held on to their money more tightly than a miser?s fist, causing many fashion firms to go bankrupt. Wary department-store buyers forced designers from New York to Milan to produce uninspired boring staples, making clients rethink their priorities in buying new clothes.

Fashionistas mutated into frugalistas. A week ago, this all changed.

I?ll coin a term to sum up the major design trend in the clothes I saw. I call it minimal maximalism, the carefully edited balance of style and substance, construction and function.

Simplicity is true beauty when tempered with correct doses of proportion, execution and decoration. French taste, after all, has defined elegance as the utter refusal of excess.

The forte of Parisian designers for Spring 2010 was creating witty and ready-to-wear garments that were unimpeachably sophisticated yet with positive youthful abandon. Clothes were often executed in floaty see-through fabrics which seemed to wrap the models in clouds.

It was a real fashion moment that redefined modern romance in dressing. The result was discreetly libidinous yet agelessly classic. The term tres chic was definitely reinvented to mark the first decade of the 21st century.

Way to go.

Three outstanding collections

Lanvin by Alber Elbaz?My once and future King of Fashion is a shy, portly genius who, like the retired Valentino, knows exactly what women want and desire. Every number is relaxed yet internally structured, as spirals of circular ruffles become sleeves then a skirt.

His show was a bombardment of visual delight in color and silhouette. An army of glamazons was garbed in an overload of perfectly manipulated fabrics which were draped but away from the body, fully beaded and regal, each looking like a multicolor princess (carnation, curry, cyclamen, violet), which made you want to twist and shout.

Not one necklace or shoe overpowering the total package of modern romantic dressing for the woman who is both cerebral and sensual.

Alexander McQueen?His entire collection was his new invention, the LPD or Little Printed Dress, destined to eclipse the LBD forever. And why not, every lady needs that indispensable shift or tank dress she can slip into and forget about it.

McQueen?s supreme innovation, though, was the classic foundation of a waisted mini dress, which incorporated architectural infusion of lavish draping away from the body. With vibrant digitally printed colors (up to 50 shades in one garment), the effect was hard yet soft, rich yet simple.

Again, McQueen is king of the new trend that is minimal maximalism. Rich brocades or gazar, printed like Imperial Asian tapestry or with exotic underwater-animal patterns, had couture treatments.

Fifty dresses were either flared or poufed, while others had brief boleros or duster coats over petticoated dresses.

These walking masterpieces were the most wearable, most innovative, and most unforgettable in Paris this week. Long live McQueen!

Chanel by Karl Lagerfeld?The Grand Palais was transformed into a huge barn with giant golden haystacks dwarfing Kaiser Karl?s hoe-down of country coquettes who flirted smiling, wearing every rustic reference for Chanel?s spring harvest.

Aprons, peasant blouses, dirndl skirts, even wooden clogs with the ubiquitous entwined C. From cane work to basket weave, hopsack to eyelet, bucolic beauties in Bardot beehives displayed the extensive repertory of Lagerfeld?s reminiscing of his Germanic countryside childhood.

Lagerfeld trumpeted the return of fun in the sun, frolicking in happy spring outfits?coupling hard and soft, sheer chiffon with knobby tweeds, organza with structured bouclé, above-the-knee hemline with high slit, for spring Chanel Tyrolean suits.

Here was Karl?s mature sensibility of marrying classic Chanel suits with trends du jour. It was tongue-in-chic, never chi-chi costumey, in every shade of pale from eggshell to peach, lavender to wheat.

?The way dressing up should be?always,? remarked Lagerfeld?s boyfriend, Baptiste Giabiconi.

Touché!