From Milan to Paris to New York, the male models ambled down runways in loose-fitting hip-huggers and snug cigarette pants. Some were bedecked in jackets of bright yellow terry cloth or white patent leather, while others were adorned in viscose shirts of aqua and cantaloupe--chests well exposed. So far as spring 1996 menswear collections are concerned, designers seemed to be rooted in a world full of festive gadabouts time-trapped in Portofino, circa 1965. Rare was the model wearing socks. If clothes make the man, fashion seems to be decreeing that man is best unmade.

Runway shows are a time for attention-getting shock and experimentation, as well as parading what the designers think will sell. And at times like these, an issue often re-emerges: Is the era of the suit at an end? Maybe, teased Naoki Takizawa, who designs for Issey Miyake and unveiled leggings and flowing pleated shirts. Perhaps, said John Rocha, as he turned out leather jackets worn shirtless over velvet trousers for the evening. Why not, winked Belgium's Walter van Beirendonck, whose models sauntered down the aisle in military pants worn with fitted midriffs.

Is this what the casual-dress movement--the age of unsuitability--has wrought? Not entirely. Despite the relaxed dress codes taking hold in offices around the world and despite the preponderance of loud leisure wear in fashion collections, designers have no intention of abandoning what has been the foundation of male attire for three centuries. Often trumpeted, occasionally heralded, the death of the suit, like the demise of the martini, has been greatly exaggerated. The stylemakers have got playful--Rei Kawakubo offered a variation in gray with reflective vinyl panels of bright color; Richard Tyler, a Glen plaid with superslim pants and a stretch cotton shirt--but they clearly don't intend to drive the suit to extinction. It has been dressed down, modified and satirized, but its essential form remains intact.

"Any drastic change in the suit would have to be preceded by major upheavals in the world as we know it today," notes the Japanese designer-cum-philosopher Yohji Yamamoto. "Men's clothing may be changing, but not as quickly as some would make you think," says Giorgio Armani, perhaps the suit's most ardent late 20th century defender. "The fact that politicians wear dark suits and ties is only natural. That gives us a kind of security. It's sacrosanct. I don't think we're all going to be dressing like Star Trek characters anytime soon."

Certainly that is the hope of working men worldwide, who have been reluctant to turn in their two- and three-piece ensembles for the handsomely stylized equivalent of fairway wear. Casual-dress Fridays have been instituted in corporations across the U.S. and Japan; billionaires like Virgin Atlantic Airways chairman Richard Branson often show up for work in denim, but the suit business does not appear to be suffering. "To our surprise and delight," notes Peter Littman, CEO of Hugo Boss, the omnipresent German clothier, "sales of suits have increased much faster than other parts of our collection." And Littman sees no change in sight. "Men," he argues, "simply look good wearing suits."

From his Savile Row atelier, Richard James, 42, even sees a backlash against the predilection for casual clothes. "The suit is returning with a vengeance. Men in businesses like advertising and the media, who dress casually all week, want a suit for going out. We sell ties to people who don't have to wear ties." Says Littman: "The man who wears jeans on casual Friday may be all the more keen to wear fabulous suits the rest of the week--or indeed, when he goes out on Saturday night."

The continued success of traditionalism is in many ways a function of intensified marketing efforts on the part of makers of classic menswear. "There is a silent revolution going on in the industry," notes Joe Barrato, an executive at Brioni, the 50-year-old Roman clothier known for incomparably tailored, impressively expensive suits. "Manufacturers and retailers are fighting the casual trend." None more aggressively than the Brioni executives, who last summer mounted a retrospective of the firm's collections at the Palazzo Corsini in Florence and issued an accompanying coffee-table book. The house is also outfitting that avatar of macho urbanity, James Bond, played this time around by Pierce Brosnan, for the latest 007 feature due this November. In a further effort to preach the gospel of formality that the label has always embodied, Brioni is publishing a book on how to wear a flower in a lapel.

If there is a suit of the moment, it is in fact the "soft suit," a nod to casualism that strikes a balance between the shapeless deconstruction of the '80s and the stiff silhouettes of previous decades. "Casual does not mean free and easy," cautions Giancarlo Giammetti, managing director of Valentino and a proponent of the soft suit. "What we have now is a more relaxed attitude, men wanting to dress less rigidly." Patrick Lavoix, who designs menswear for Christian Dior, paraded what he called a variety of "nonchalant suits" in his spring collection. The Hemingway-inspired jackets were stripped of their lining and shoulder pads and worn with trousers cut like jeans. Calvin Klein offered a quintessential soft suit for fall: a one-button, single-breasted jacket narrow at the waist, pants lean and fluid.

Designers generally agree that the emergence of the softer look owes a great deal to advances in fabric technology. Notes Lavoix: "Extraordinary research has been undertaken by fabric industrialists, who apply the latest techniques to their methods of treating fibers, rendering the threads more and more practical, functional, lightweight and at the same time able to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer." Takizawa has made use of complex rayon- and nylon-based fibers with names like memory and monofilament twill that, he says, pick up color well and do not wrinkle.

In the past years, suits have become far more experimental in terms of hue. Nowhere is that more evident than in the collections of menswear's best loved post-modernist, Londoner Paul Smith. For spring he has churned out suits in electric or powder blue, others in a mix of orange and apple green. Remarkably, the Brioni line, which has never veered far from a family of charcoals, navys and browns, has done the same, dabbling in saffron, indigo and cassis for fall. "Even the most conservative businessmen are lightening up a bit," says Anna Zegna of Milan's staid Zegna Ermenegildo boutique. "They will allow subtle colors in their dark uniforms."

And what if they allowed bolder, more dramatic changes? Blinding fuschias? Hints of moira? What if they rejected the suit altogether? Designers continue to toy with that idea, but the fact is, even the young and the restless still like it. "If you look at the young people from 20 to 25, dancing at clubs in London, in Paris, in New York, in Munich--they're wearing dark suits and white shirts and a tie," observes Littman of Hugo Boss. Sam Pratt, 26, a free-lance writer and publisher of his own pop-culture 'zine, Ersatz, agrees. He does not work in an office and is known in fashionable young Manhattan media circles as the guy who never leaves his house in anything but a dark wool suit--no matter how intense the heat wave, no matter how inconsequential the errand. Remarks Pratt: "You feel like you've accomplished something in a suit--even when you haven't."

Depending on one's aesthetic, the suit is evolving or devolving, but it shows no signs yet of becoming the missing link.

--Reported by Greg Burke/ Milan, Dorie Denbigh/Paris, Kate Noble/ London and Irene Kunii/Tokyo