FASHION : Not for Every Body : Some should accept age more gracefully by giving up the California obsession with tight-fitting workout clothes.

“Fahrkarten, bitte.”

As the train rattle-clacked from Berlin toward Hamburg, I reached into my purse to show my ticket to the conductor. Outside, the landscape looked like something out of an Emil Nolde canvas: a dull metal-gray sky, streaked with purple and orange, as the sun went down in the distance.

After the door to my compartment closed, I contemplated what was ahead of me. It had been a long time since I’d seen my German-born cousin.

The first meeting took place when I was 13. He was 19 and had come to stay with my family. Over the next few years we’d managed to see each other now and then, sometimes on his turf and occasionally on mine. But as we got older and our lives became more complicated, communication dwindled to letters and occasional phone calls. Now it had been 10 years since we’d set eyes on one another.

As the train neared the station, I felt sure I would recognize him immediately. After all, every time I’d seen him in the past he had appeared much the same: tall, lean and athletic-looking.

Suddenly I felt uneasy. Both of us had had kids during the last decade. The difference, of course, was that I had actually carried them in my body. Time had also done a bit of fancy footwork on me. What if he didn’t recognize me?

When the train came to a stop, I stepped tentatively onto the platform. Couples, elderly people and teen-agers pushed past me to greet other suitcase-laden passengers. There was no sign of my cousin.

Suddenly, a familiar face appeared and a hand waved in the distance. But as he neared, the mental picture I had of him melted. The man walking toward me was heavier and balding. What hair he had left was more gray than brown.

He grinned and picked up my suitcase. As always, he seemed completely comfortable in his own skin.

Later, after dinner, my cousin leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. Then he leaned forward and looked at me intently. “Do you do quite a lot to your hair?” he asked.

The question, I knew, was about more than my hair color. It was about an attitude. I paused before I answered, “Let’s just say I’m not ready to go gentle into that good night.”

His expression was puzzled.

“I just give nature a little boost every once in a while,” I explained.

My cousin pointed to a plaque in German on the wall. I recognized it as The Desiderata, found in a church in Baltimore and dated 1692. I had the same thing in English on a wall at home.

“Take kindly the counsel of years,” he read aloud, “surrendering gracefully the things of youth.”

I didn’t think about the conversation again until a plane trip a couple of time zones later. It came back to me when I was back home and noticed something I hadn’t seen very often while in Europe: Everywhere I looked, women throughout Ventura County were wearing tight, body-hugging clothes that ranged from Spandex shorts with multicolored bullet-bras, to Lycra cat suits with high heels. Once something seen only at the gym, the outfits now were being sported at the grocery store, in the shopping mall and on the streets of Ventura to Simi Valley.

The clothes, I learned later, were being referred to by designers as “hard-body fashions.” A salesgirl at Judy’s in Ventura said many of the clothes were being worn at dance clubs.

“The pieces are lean,” said Mossimo Giannulli, an Irvine-based designer who, like many other designers this year, is using a lot of Lycra and French terry, a fleecelike material that stretches.

“I don’t want to use the word skimpy ,” he said, “but the silhouettes are definitely meant to show off the body.” Many of his designs, he added, are for swimwear that can double as “club wear for the hip person.”

Now I’m a hip person, but not the way Giannulli means it. And the truth is that I’d rather place yellow Post-It notes all over my body that say “CELLULITE” with accompanying arrows than wear one of these outfits in public. The only way I’d consider it is if my primary relationship in life was with a Nautilus machine--and even then, only if the event I was attending was being held at the Braille Institute.

But what struck me was how many women out there clearly do not feel the same way.

Besides the bodies for which these clothes were designed--young, fit and muscular, according to Giannulli--there also are plenty of older women walking around in them, in addition to people who look like the “before” ads for Jenny Craig.

What could have possessed them?

Maybe, I reflected, it is a positive sign, an indication that more and more women are not basing their self-esteem on the size of their waists. They are dressing to make themselves feel good.

On the other hand, maybe it means something else. Maybe, as my cousin had suggested to me, this is an instance of needing to gracefully surrender the things of youth--something, I know, that isn’t always easy to do. Beauty and perfection in Southern California sometimes feel flaunted, a chocolate eclair waved in the face of a dieter.

At home, I looked in the mirror for an honest assessment. Another gray hair had sprouted, protruding like a flag on a mountaintop.

But this time as I reached for the tweezers, I stopped in mid-grasp. Just for the novelty, I thought, it could stay for a day.