Been searching for my signature style.

Byline: SECOND THOUGHTS By Lynne Horner For The Register-Guard

Here's what I'm thinking: Everyone needs a signature something-or-other that sets us apart from everyone else. Some little thing - or big if we're inclined - that makes us feel less like a member of a herd and more like the unique persons we are.

Fashion icon Diana Vreeland's signature, for example, was a wardrobe of constant black and surroundings and accessories of vibrant red.

Vreeland, lest you're younger than some of my underwear or just not into fashion magazines' family trees, was a columnist-then-fashion editor at Harper's Bazaar for 26 years before she was hired on at Vogue, in 1963. There, she ruled with spontaneity and great elan for eight years, putting Vogue in a league of its own.

And whereas she was never even remotely attractive ("ugly as a mud hen," my mother used to say), she was smart and witty and possessed a sense of style the likes of which hasn't been lived up to since.

Possibly she can attribute her successes to her mother, a vapid woman with questionable taste and parenting skills, who once said to her, "It's too bad that you have a beautiful sister and that you are so extremely ugly."

Yikes.

It was Vreeland's idea to assign photo shoots in exotic parts of the world (imagine a model in a bridal gown, say, draped over the back of an elephant or astride an ostrich), and readers loved them. Eventually, however, the powers that be ran out of enthusiasm for her extravagant, wildly over-budget projects, and fired her in 1971.

Seems to me that might have been the year she made the wacky decision to reformat the magazine to read from back to front.

"What a good idea!" she must have said to herself in the wee, small hours of a morning - or after 30 cocktails one night - "to turn the whole thing around! They'll love it!"

Good idea if you publish for the Japanese, who got that idea a gahzillion years ago and are sticking with it. Not so hot if we're talking New York - which is why there was only one issue, if memory serves, of a bass-ackwards American Vogue.

Good grief, where was I going with this? Oh, sure: Vreeland's signature.

Red lips, red nails, red cheeks, red sofa, red office, red living room - the woman owned the color red. Even in her final years, those sagging cheeks and thoroughly puckered lips (smoking, very in vogue at the time, does nothing good for lips and did nothing good for her lungs; she died of emphysema) - were as red as all get out.

Men are no strangers to signatures. World-renowned architect, I.M. Pei (Boston's JFK Library and more than a dozen museums around the globe, including the Grand Louvre in Paris, to mention just a few of his innovations), has a wonderful signature: smallish, round, black glasses. I'll wager that if he broke them one day, no one would recognize him until he got them fixed.

Probably, he has a pair in every drawer.

Vogue's current fashion editor, Anna Wintour, also has her signature. She could hardly assume red, since Vreeland so thoroughly made it hers. And, besides, who wants to be an also-ran in the fashion community.

Wintour (thought to be the inspiration for the Meryl Streep character in "The Devil Wears Prada") wears omnipresent sunglasses, and a severe blunt cut that she's had since she was 15.

She looks good. My hair at 15 was straight and stringy and the color of cream of celery soup (they put lots of chlorine in pools in those days) - no good signature there.

The reason I'm prattling on about this signature business is because I don't have one, and I think I may want one.

I know, I know. Too late in the game, and I should've been working on this 30 years ago, before all the good ones were taken. I look like a mushroom in hats, so that's out.

Vintage clothing is a nifty signature, but not practical for a woman who wobbles in high heels and looks like a mushroom in hats.

Well, now here's something: I took a 10-minute break from this blither to paint a chandelier lime green and the wind shifted on me midspray. I think I've found my signature: green feet! I don't think anyone's thought of this yet.

Well, poop. Except for Shrek and the Jolly Green Giant.

Back to the drawing board.

Lynne Horner is a free-lance writer who lives in Springfield. You can e-mail her at [e-mail].