At 6 p.m. last Tuesday, the elevator doors opened on the eighth floor of Macy's in Herald Square in New York, exhaling shoppers squished to the shape of sausages and inhaling the echoing sound of a woman's British-accented voice.

"This is our Monte Carlo dot tankini," said the woman, Anne Vincent, the director of special events and merchandising for Vogue, as a model wearing a demure Jantzen bathing suit stepped onto a platform in the middle of the swim department. You would have thought it was the 1950s, the scene was so sweetly old-fashioned.

"We love all these polka-dot looks because they are great for mixing and matching," Vincent narrated. "We call it the 'meet and greet' look, where the top meets the bottom." The spotted halter top called up images of Norma Jeane Baker (pre Marilyn Monroe) or Janet Leigh sunning atop a float in the Rose Bowl parade. It was just saying howdy-do to a high-waist black swimsuit bottom. How civilized.

As swimsuit season approaches, women are discovering that many of this summer's suits represent a sharp turnaround from the crass arrangement of string and sequins that in recent years has made the Hamptons shore look like a Vegas sideshow.

Probably for the first time since Lindsay Lohan was born, fashion designers, from the high-end likes of Miuccia Prada and Stella McCartney to mainstream classics such as Jantzen, have taken a more refined approach to swimwear, emphasizing one-piece looks, halter tops, high-waist boy shorts and ruffles and ruching as camouflaging details. Jantzen's most popular look this season is a sassily ruched one-piece, updated in lifeguard red and now called the Vamp, which would seem to encourage accessorizing with a cigarette and a martini more than a Pilates stick.

"The extra coverage feels really right," said designer Shoshanna Gruss. "What more people are realizing is that these shapes are beautiful, and more women can wear these. More is more."

Now one could argue that the covered-up direction in swimwear has something to do with the tanking economy (ahem, tankini), or perhaps it is a precautionary statement against too much sun exposure. More likely, such looks have come around again for the same reason they were popular a half-century ago. As the Macy's window display of historic Jantzen suits would suggest, leaving a little to the imagination imparts a lot of allure. Care for an example? A black lace suit from 1954 was called the Man Trap.