Winter Coats Back to Berlin BERLIN - It has been so long since the European winter was more than a mild gray season with a few frosty patches, that the winter coat had almost faded from fashion. The transition from wool jacket to a similar item in leather or shearling had taken over from traditional outerwear. Add a waterproof trench and a puffa down coat to your wardrobe, and the three chilly months from December to March were just about covered. Then came climate change, with its extremes of cold and heat. While the Copenhagen summit meeting is the focus of world attention, fashion seems already to be reflecting a new winter reality and reconsidering its casual rejection of a crucial piece of clothing. Central Europe has long been an exception. From Germany's hard-frost cities through the former East bloc countries, the proper coat never faded away. And the renewed fashion interest in streamlined tailoring comes arrow-straight from that heritage. The images of Berlin streets of a century ago seem to have inspired designers to take ruler and compass and retrace that first glimpse of modernism. Typical of the genre is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. In his series of Berlin cityscapes, an elongated figure would be walking forward, depicted as one linear brushstroke from high collar to thin- heeled ankle boots. The melancholy elegance of the city crowd is caught at that particular winter moment when mid-afternoon slips into dusk, the colors a mélange of gray, green, petrol blue and purple. The images of "Women in the Street," painted by Kirchner between 1910 and 1914, capture the edgy elegance. He and fellow artists who made up the "Brücke," or "bridge," group rejected the sinuous, decorative swirls of Art Nouveau in favor of lean lines, charged with energy and emotion. The artists, who had often trained as architects, wanted to suggest something happening under the sleek surfaces of these apparently casual city strollers. A fresh fashion architecture is behind the winter coats, which are being cut, mainly from cloth, for the present season. Of course, there are still the ubiquitous trench coats, often at their most lush in leather. But the major change is in proportions: longer, leaner and indisputably intended as a cover-up. The days when Berlin's Unter den Linden was a perambulating fashion parade have long gone, as have other former fashionable board walks from London's royal Pall Mall to the Champs Elysées of Marcel Proust's Paris. The idea of the boulevardier no longer exists in a crazy busy world. Yet there is a certain swish and bravado about the current coats, whether that attitude comes from the generous lines of a blanket shape or a closer-fitting cut, tracing the body. The blanket coat was shown dramatically at Comme des Garçons, where the wrap of a checked rug suggested cover-ups improvised from a battlefield. Other versions were more conventional, yet set the squares of cloth asymmetrically to refresh the cover-up concept. The Hermès woman, envisioned by Jean Paul Gaultier as an early flying pioneer like Amelia Earhart, wore her coat as a floor-length piece of impeccable tailoring. What all the new coats have in common is that they work well with pants. In fact, at Yves Saint Laurent, Stefano Pilati even made a gray flannel coat with toning trousers as an updated version of the pantsuit. At Chloé, Hannah MacGibbon showed square-cut coats that balanced thicker, wider trousers. Chloé also had the camel color, one of the sleepers of the season, that looked as fresh in Donna Karan's belted coat as in the sharp-cut version from Jil Sander. To call these coats mannish suggests that men have continued to wear such styles, although the masculine tailored coat died away from the 1960s, to be replaced by ubiquitous sportswear, from fleeces through parkas. Yet there is a template for the lean coat over pants - and it comes, once again, from those German Expressionist paintings. Where Toulouse-Lautrec's flamboyant aristocrats, their coats crowned with top hats, seem entirely historical, Kirchner's men have the same elongated elegance as the women they accompany. With their slightly more aggressive stance, striding forward in flat shoes under straight pants, they are picture perfect for modern times.