What used to be called ladies fashion is on my mind. The reason: A friend and I had a conversation a few months ago and she mentioned that she really would like to go out and buy new clothes but there is nothing for her in the stores. This surprised me. There’s a lot in the stores. But she explained her predicament, and it made complete sense to me. She is in her fifties and looks it, and happily. She doesn’t want to be young, she wants to be her age. She has four kids and she pretty much likes her life and her work; she likes the stage she’s at. This, as she explained it, is what she wants: Grownup clothes that are chic and well made and womanly and made of good fabrics and natural things. She likes wool and silk and cotton. But she wants to look like a grownup woman in the way that grownup women looked when she was a kid. A skirt at mid-calf length, a handsomely fit jacket. Heels. Maybe even a hat. She either said, or I imagined, Katharine Hepburn in the movie “Desk Set.” Hepburn was in early middle age and looked sleek, womanly, mature, but not in a boring way. Chic in a deeper sense, not just an “in style at the moment” way.

My friend made it clear that she feels most high-end woman’s fashion is aimed at making people seem younger, hipper. Sleeveless, short, spare in the modern way. This is not what she wants. I asked her where she does buy clothes. She sort of shrugged and said she tends to default to inexpensive things that are adequate. She said she’ll go to the catalogues and buy something from J. Crew.

Here’s the message for designers: She wants to be spending more money on stuff she loves and not less money on things she doesn’t.

I thought everything she said reasonable, understandable, and an insightful. So, we asked Tina Isaac, whom Joan Juliet Buck knows from Paris Vogue, if there was any hope to be had in the fashion shows they just held in Paris.

The Paris shows as you know are not aimed at the traditional. Young designers are trying to break through with startling and unusual work. (I would say they are unusual in the usual way.) I think they view fashion as a highly sexualized entity, in part because they’re young and live in a highly sexualized business and cultural environment. Also from what I’ve observed reading fashion magazines, a lot of them are intellectuals or think of themselves as intellectuals, in a way that I find abstract and not grounded in a reality I would recognize as reality.

However, what starts in Paris will likely, as Meryl Streep says in her famous speech in “The Devil Wears Prada,” wind up, one way or