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HE WAY Swedes dress is distinctive. A youth-oriented culture, the clothing stores are packed every summer weekend with Stockholm’s most fashionable crowding in. Not that anyone is panicking even if the population density has increased fourfold all of a sudden. They're concentrating too hard on the clothes.
   Men—lads for the most part, donning hairstyles that were the epitome of cool as worn by Bodie on The Professionals—check out the latest jeans and suits, including items that have such pizazz that it would hit jantelagen for six and be at home on the comic pages of Dick Tracy. Women face even greater variety, with French companies such as Morgan well represented and Hennes & Mauritz in more places than snow falls in winter here.
   It's a culture that cares about how it looks. Go to the business district of Stockholm on a Friday evening and it's not about boring suits, but a virtual fashion parade. If anyone's conservative, it's the dark-blazered twentysomething girl—trying to tone down her beauty so others can concentrate on the job—but seemingly not anyone else. The unfashionable tended to stay away, just out of obligation for city tidiness.
   At sport stores like the Stadium chain, where one can pick up dark business socks and expensive Nike trainers, the local brand—Casall—keeps the fashion flag flying.
   There's a clean edge to Swedish design, from modernist architecture to graphics, even if it means the latest Casall catalogue has overly small type, perhaps inspired by how tiny 9 pt looks on a high-resolution Apple Mac monitor. Reading the catalogue is an academic task that no one is likely to do; examining the clothes is key here, something that suits the behaviour of the Swedish buyer, tack.

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