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OURS IS A CITY OF OBSESSIVES, A community where wants become needs with astonishing speed. Because this penchant manifests at an alarmingly tender age, those seeking to make their fortunes are well advised to investigate what is known as the teen trend market. This booming segment of the clothing industry, replete with low-rise jeans and faux diamond jewelry, has spawned a glut of stores whose merchandise is nearly identical and whose names are cute and snappy enough to appeal to the Clearasil crowd. Witness Forever 21 and Wet Seal, emporiums that cater to a clientele young enough to apprehend the peace symbol that adorns countless T-shirts as nothing more than a fashion statement. In what context do you shop for fringed skirts and hobo handbags when you know Santana solely as the up-and-coming designer of the Carlos by Carlos Santana shoe line?

Nonetheless, each weekend a determined cadre of 13-, 14-, 15% and 16-year-old girls--crisp $20 bills or their mother's VISA cards stashed in their Kate Spade knockoffs--emerges from buses that convey them from Ladera Heights and Hancock Park to the Westside Pavilion and the Beverly Center. They make their way through racks of drape-necked, V-necked, and bias-cut slip dresses; of cargo, drawstring, and flat-front pants; of Ultrasuede halter tops and paisley shirts with lace-up bodices, crocheted backs, split sleeves, and keyhole necklines--a dizzying array of items priced from $9 to $49 that are, for the most part, age appropriate for their mothers.

The teen trend business owes a debt of gratitude to the '60s, when traditions were reshuffled and young people broke loose of ways that condemned them in the '50s to dressing in Peter Pan collars and Mary Janes, listening to Patti Page and Perry Como, and doing what was appropriate. It was appropriate for girls to wear skirts that fell above their knees; it was inappropriate for a woman to dress in jeans after 40. As rock and roll gave teenagers music of their own, it blurred these tightly drawn lines and rid society of the basic organizing principle that everything has its place and time. These young people grew older long before they grew up, an inevitability, perhaps, for a generation that spent the first part of life espousing that no one over 30 could be trusted, an idee fixe that would set them to favoring clothes not just unisex but uni-age. This is not the first time baby boomers have created the very thing they now resent--in this case, a one-age-suits-all style of dressing that gives pubescent females a chance to play Lolita.

HAUTE COUTURE HAS PARIS and Milan; ready-to-wear has New York. Teen trend has what neither group wanted: It has Southern California. At first it had only the Newport Beach bikini shop where Wet Seal originated in 1962, a cubbyhole with sandy floors that could henceforth claim to be the Independence Hall of the teen trend movement.

This phenomenon's coming-of-age would mirror that of Wet Seal, a label that grew slowly but steadily throughout the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Still, not until 1995 did the company's stock skyrocket; currently Wet Seal has 584 stores in 44 states that take up nearly 2.5 million square feet of retail space. It also has a chain, Arden B., that has 89 stores geared to women between 20 and 35 and is, as described in the sales-speak its parent company favors, "a lifestyle-oriented shopping destination for contemporary young women."

By the time Arden B. came into being in 1998, it was clear that the retail clothing industry had become a behemoth: too large, too centralized, too self-referential. Inspiration was overtaken by the imperative to produce up to half a dozen collections a year, resulting in a trajectory that brings to mind the final hours of the Titanic. The teen trend market, while lacking the panache of design houses, has one great advantage over them: Its customers quickly outgrow what they own and require new clothes with stunning frequency, which makes their purchases the polar opposite of investment dressing. Manufacturers are put in the lucrative position of supplying an unending demand of disposable fashion decreed by nature, clothes so cheaply constructed that by the time Mom and Dad open the bill, these items may well have lost their color, their shape, or their ruching.

Unlike the high end of the retail business, the teen trend movement does not have designers; it has design directors, whose livelihoods are owed largely to the fact that clothing designs are not protected by copyright. On the other hand, design directors, like high-end designers, are guided by an uncanny instinct for whom to steal from, a fact of fashion life that creates a trickle-down effect: Prada copies Andalusian garb, Marc Jacobs copies vintage, and soon we see polyester renderings of their tiered chiffon skirts and delicate short-sleeved blouses at young adult stores like Arden B. and its rival, bebe. A week or so later, Forever 21 and Wet Seal, where price points and demographics are considerably lower, will offer the same skirts and blouses in nylon. Perhaps that is why Arden B.'s sales staff are often unsettled by the sight of people who they assume to be emissaries from other establishments photographing their window displays. The outrage they express over this creative thievery seems, under the circumstances, less than warranted.

No item in recent memory was a bigger boon to these stores than the Tom Ford black silk off-the-shoulder gypsy blouse for Saint Laurent that had the twin advantages of being easily reproduced and of looking reasonably good in polyester and nylon. It is this blouse that has lured two 13-year-olds to Wet Seal at the Beverly Center, though they soon decide to spend their money on something else. Lydia and Sabrina often shop at Wet Seal, or rather, Lydia does, and Sabrina, who cares little for clothes, often accompanies her.

These shopping adventures offer more than a schooling in sartorial niceties. Each walk from the dressing room to the cash register becomes a lesson in managing money Lydia pays with the credit card her mother gives her at the start of each school year. Its $500 limit forces her into choices not easily made by one whose appetite for clothes is considerable. Because Sabrina could not care less about fashion, an allowance is unnecessary; before she left the house this morning her parents handed her a twenty.

"I don't have to ask for it," Sabrina says. "They're so glad when I want to buy something that they can't wait to give it to me."

Today she is wearing her preferred outfit, a T-shirt from Old Navy and jeans from Rampage, another teen trend store a few doors away. Lydia wants Sabrina to get a sundress, one of many that Wet Seal carries in softly hued patterns.

Still, like shoppers of every age, what Sabrina is seeking is the sense of well-being that money cannot buy When she tries on the dress and studies herself in the mirror, she doesn't want to buy it.

"It doesn't look good on me," she says.

"It does," says Lydia with the perkiness of a cheerleader for the losing team. "It goes with your eyes. You look great."

"I don't think so," says Sabrina.

"If you don't buy this dress, I'll never talk to you again--and I mean it."

The dress duly purchased, Lydia and Sabrina linger, admiring the strappy satin disco heels and the hat with leather leaf appliques, seeming less like girls and more like women with each passing minute. In that tableau you see the genius of the teen trend market, which is guided by the truth that when the place and time for everything is up for grabs, the young do not remain young for long.