Dresses inspire confidence, retailers said. "They always make you look pulled together," said Colleen Sherin, the fashion director of Saks Fifth Avenue. "That's what makes them such a success." Production advances, she added, have made summer cottons and silk lighter and more wearable.

And more romantically evocative. Younger women, who once adopted the dress as a cheeky send up of mid-20th century feminine stereotypes, are now dispensing with such ironies and acknowledging the frankly sensual appeal of the dress. Elizabeth Wurtzel seemed to touch on its attractions more than a decade ago when she lamented in "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women" that "our entire culture has become dowdy."

The episodic interest in red-hot lipstick, stiletto heels and silky lingerie, Ms. Wurtzel said, "seems an attempt to redress this loss of style and sensuality. We as a people miss playing dress-up."

That notion wasn't lost on Mary Alice Stephenson, a fashion consultant in New York. "Wearing a dress is the fastest way to assert your feminine self," she said.That idea takes hold early in some women's lives. Sarah Girner, a photographer, 33, discovered dresses at 16, when she said that she was "at the threshold of becoming a woman." She said she has been captivated ever since by the "grace and elegance inherent a dress, the way it flows and moves." Her fascination, she said, has only intensified with time.

"So much is tied up in a dress, " Bettina May said, "a lot of emotions and politics." But the real attraction "is how confident and on top of my game I feel wearing a dress," she said. "It's so much a part of the whole ritual of becoming a woman, like putting on lipstick and all your little fixings." Its transformative power first struck her as a toddler. "I used to throw tantrums when my mom tried to put me in pants and a shirt," she said.

Her recollections chime with the results of a behavioral study, "Pink Frilly Dresses and Early Gender Identity," published last year by Princeton University. According to the authors, Diane N. Ruble, Leah E. Lurye and Kristina M. Zosuls, researchers in developmental psychology, "A large proportion of girls pass through a stage when they virtually refuse to go out of the house unless they are wearing a dress." In very young children, they concluded, "pink frilly dresses are especially salient and concrete feature of 'girl-ness.' " It's not surprising, then, to learn that some women's favorite dresses have something demure and old-fashioned about them, if not downright chaste. Ideally, Whitney May said: "A dress should have a bit of a childlike quality to it. It should be elegant and sophisticated but not too revealing."

Something, perhaps, like the polka-dot navy frock worn by Emily Schwartz, a graphic designer in Brooklyn, scooped out at the back, but primly reminiscent of a pinafore. Or Ms. May's own dress, embellished with innocent-looking scallop embroidery.

"In an outfit like this, I never feel too fashionably aggressive, like I'm dressing up or trying to hard," Ms. May said. "When I wear it, I feel youthful, ready to move, ready to laugh, ready to be spontaneous."