A little over a year ago, amid the hard edge of stripped-down fashion, a group of designers began developing a new way of looking at women. Models were the inspiration. But don't wince; the result was nonchalant luxury, adaptable to varying lives and body types. After all, models today, though still beautiful by putative standards, often appear off duty in quite relaxed clothing.

Among the designers who looked in their direction was Narciso Rodriguez. Marc Jacobs, too, prominently defined the genre: expensive sportswear with an air of insouciance. Mr. Rodriguez's style started to evolve three years ago, when he was the design director at Tse, the cashmere house. It became vivid the following year when he began work as the designer for Cerruti, a job from which he was abruptly dismissed in a hotel room in Paris last March after a well-received show because he had refused to sign a two-year contract.

Though, at 36, Mr. Rodriguez says he is still in the process of defining a Rodriguez oeuvre, he already has an imprint and has risen from the rubble of his dismissal to command global attention: as a designer with his first signature collection, which will be in stores this spring; as the designer of his own forward-looking fur collection, licensed to Goldin Feldman, and as the design director for women's wear for Loewe, a Spanish luxury-leather company owned by LVMH Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton. The collection will make its debut during the Paris runway shows in March. Mr. Rodriguez brought his model-inspired touch to his most widely publicized undertaking, the simple, pearl bias-cut gown worn by Carolyn Bessette when she married John F. Kennedy Jr. in September 1996.

Mr. Rodriguez is one of a generation of designers, including Mr. Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Stella McCartney and Michael Kors, that finds itself unable to resist the lure of being a gun for hire for big companies. The new trend has seemed in many ways a dubious opportunity, forced on designers by disappearing financing and by the globalization of the fashion business.

But on second glance, the chance to conduct the design notes of several collections at once has given these designers the opportunity to shape global fashion more quickly perhaps than their predecessors, who became names under their own labels.

Before Mr. Rodriguez joined Cerruti, the company had a respected Italian men's-wear line favored by stars like Clint Eastwood and a women's collection of less than passing interest. Mr. Rodriguez began working with Nino Cerruti, the house patriarch and designer, in 1995.

Within a year he had attracted the attention of top fashion editors and retailers to what was then a moribund collection. Ms. Bessette-Kennedy's dress was made in the Cerruti atelier in Paris, and the house's name was newly linked to glamour and youth last March when the actress Claire Danes glistened with modern beauty at the Oscars' ceremony when she hit the red carpet in a tight periwinkle blue cashmere pullover and languorous chiffon skirt brushing her ankles. It is a style the designer continues to perfect.

''What I'm trying to capture with the look is something more sensual, more feminine,'' Mr. Rodriguez said. ''For me, designing is such a personal thing. It's really emotional -- that's part of my Latin upbringing.''

His first signature collection, which will be in stores like Barneys New York, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, Linda Dresner and Tootsies in Houston, plays with sparkling knee-length skirts cut against the grain in haberdasher's fabrics. Here also are skinny tops, some of them tubes or halters that reveal the shoulders, and knee-length bias sheaths in gossamer layers of chiffon. These are clothes that models like Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss might wear.

What inspired Mr. Rodriguez's move from the sharp corners of minimalism toward the soft swishes of romanticism was, he said, fashion's growing tendency to forget the intended subject of design. ''Clothes seemed to be about ego, not about women being beautiful,'' he said.