magazines trumpet the look with multipage shopping guides headlined "Hail to the Chief." Teenagers are buying woolly shawls. Shawls!

From the omnivorous minds of fashion designers, who want us in soldier chic one minute and Bollywood brilliance the next, a communal word emerged as the Gospel of Fall: "neo-Navajo!" they declared, flinging Navajo iconography all across the mall.

There are arrows on bracelets and medallions on miniskirts and woven patterns on skinny jeans that cost $660 at Barneys New York.

Even this: "Navajo Hipster Panties," at Urban Outfitters, printed with zigzags and stars, which an online reviewer loves because they make her "bum look delicious." Ahem.

It's such a fashion buzzword that a solid-blue robe at Target is christened "Navajo Navy" - a color we thought was named after a military branchwas, like, a Navajo tube top," says Jaclyn Roessel, 28, who grew up learning to weave on the reservation and now works in education programming at the Heard Museum.

She sees girls her age wearing the look everywhere: feather earrings for a dinner downtown, or Navajo prints on the light rail, where she spotted an Arizona State University student in a dress so gorgeous that Roessel wished it was hers.

"It was so pretty, but I don't know - I don't know if I could pull it off," Roessel says, and she's not sure she should try.

This modern moment is an odd twist for Navajoland, where parents and politicians alike worry endlessly about too much USA leaking onto their 17.2 million-acre homeland - a wide corner of Arizona where wandering