ON A NORTHWEST COURSE : Forget adobes and coyotes and deserts. Southwest style has come and gone. Think cabins and salmon and forests, as the anti-style of Seattle takes over what we see, hear and wear.

History is a series of momentous shifts: Republican leadership gives way to Democratic. The two-parent family bows to the era of the single mother. And, most recently, moose creamers have edged out coyote salt-and-pepper shakers on the nation’s dinner tables.

The Southwest style that once captured the palates and decorator instincts of Americans has passed its zenith. These days, the style and look reign supreme from a once-neglected corner of the continent.

It’s Northwest style. Down-to-earth as an old flannel shirt and genuine as a pound of Starbucks coffee beans, the new attitude is partly a reaction to years of greed and excess. It’s thrifty, humble, politically correct and kind.

What this means, in practical terms, is that Californians no longer need yank up roots and move north because, now, an awesome variety of Northwest goods and services are being packaged and exported to them.

“The Southwest / Santa Fe style is totally out,” declares Emily Wang, manager of the Eddie Bauer Home Collection at Los Angeles’ Beverly Center. “All the bold Southwest colors have been replaced by greens and muted Northwest colors.”

It was about time for Southwest celebrity to run its course, according to David Stewart, a consumer psychologist and professor of marketing at USC. “Most of these regional fashion cycles are relatively short-lived, lasting four to six years,” he says.

“In our country, we tend to identify with the region where we live and think of others as exotic. That’s why, for awhile, New England had its day in the sun. California certainly had its day in the ‘60s. And now it’s the Northwest.”

So far, the most successful exports are Seattle grunge-rock bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. The bands in turn have spawned an equally triumphant spinoff fashion look, unveiled during the spring designer shows in New York and in this month’s Vogue magazine.

Department stores feature the plaid flannel shirts, hiking boots, long johns and knit caps favored by grungers; mannequins wear layers of thrift store-type clothes, as if swathed against the Northwest drizzle.

Even the stringy, unwashed hair popular with grunge rockers is for sale, according to Vogue. (The product: Sebastian’s Molding Mud).

“Anything that Eddie Vedder or Chris Cornell wears is showing up in popular culture a few months later,” says Celia Hirschman, executive director of marketing for A&M; Records, referring to the lead singers for Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. “I was in a May Company this weekend, and there was a whole section geared to that lumberjack look.”

But the Northwest influence hardly ends with grunge. The Eddie Bauer Home Collection offers a riot of north-woods items-- faux deer-antler picture frames, trout door knockers and rustic, “Northern Exposure”-style furniture.

Without even leaving the mall, Angelenos can get a Northwest holiday fix. The Broadway is displaying a northern pine tree ornamented for Christmas in tiny lumberjacks, pine cones and a Santa in a plaid grunge-style shirt. The Northwest tree replaced last season’s Santa Fe model, which was bedecked with glass chili-pepper ornaments, says John Goodine, home store coordinator for the Southern California Broadway stores.

Television and film also are doing their part to perpetuate the lattes- and-rain mythos. If “Northern Exposure,” “Twin Peaks” and the film “Singles” aren’t enough, coming soon is a Nora Ephron release, “Sleepless in Seattle,” starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

“It’s the ‘Singles’ thing aimed at an older crowd,” explains Seattle Weekly film critic Mary Brennan.

There’s more: Starbucks--a name synonymous with Seattle’s caffeine addiction, and a mainstay on the Washington state ferries--has 156 stores bringing Seattle-style coffee culture to cities including Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and San Diego. Non-Northwesterners are so hungry for this taste of Puget Sound that they line up to be first served when a new store opens, according to Howard Schultz, Starbucks president and CEO. (The latest of 11 Southern California Starbucks has opened at 7th and Montana in Santa Monica.)

Northwest style is even influencing advertisers. “It’s an overall sensibility that seems to be moving down here and is being adopted by anyone who wants to communicate with younger Americans,” says Adam Mandel, accountant director for the Livingston Keye advertising agency in Venice.

And staples of Northwest dining are showing up on menus across the United States, says Sinclair Philip, owner of the Sooke Harbour House, a southern Vancouver Island establishment quietly famous for its cuisine. Among the most popular food exports are wild mushrooms, wild salmon and wild salad greens such as miner’s lettuce and chickweed.

The region is exporting everything from comics (Lynda Barry and Gary Larson hail from the area, as does the trendy alternative comics publisher Fantagraphics) to mysteries--J. A. Jance and Earl Emerson are just two of the many local mystery writers who spice their work with regional buzzwords: coffee, slugs and backpacks.

Then there are the business exports: Microsoft software, Boeing jets and McCaw cellular phones, to name a few.

The Northwest is even exporting revolution--the hot new punk feminist movement known as Riot Grrrls got started in sleepy Olympia, 65 miles south of Seattle.

The sheer volume of Northwest-inspired products and ideas seems to be the work of a marketing wizard with a mandate to sell the region.

That’s not quite how it happened. The seeds of a takeover were planted a few years ago when high housing prices and urban woes made Seattle attractive to Californians contemplating escape. Before that, the area had been pretty much dismissed as a backwater. Seattle used to be “a byword for gruff, provincial dullness,” wrote the British author Jonathan Raban. “It was tainted by the smell of sawmills and dead halibut.”

All that changed, though, in proportion to how bad things were elsewhere. The region’s open spaces and relatively low population density became more significant than the negatives--cultural and climatic.

Harassed urbanites made excursions north and took home tales of a people who obsessively drank strong, dark coffee and drove to work with kayaks strapped to their cars.

“I think what happened is people came here and were exposed to things they had not seen before and they took those experiences back and seeded the market for us,” says Starbucks’ Schultz.

Starbucks, REI (Recreational Equipment Inc.) and other Northwest companies began to acquire devoted customers in parts of the country where they had never advertised. REI, an outdoors gear co-op started by 23 mountain climbers in 1938, began opening three to four stores a year in 1988, around the time Seattle began to capture national attention.

Then came the television shows, the grunge bands and Nirvana’s hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Suddenly, Seattle was not only identified with escape but with youth, energy and creativity as well. A place that had always been indistinct took on an aura, a glow.

“This landscape was a blank in people’s imaginative maps,” says Raban, who moved to Seattle from London in 1990. “But recently I’ve been aware that the Northwest is gaining a kind of visual identity. Bit by bit, this land is being made public and mythical, like New England of the 19th Century, or the American South.”

Raban attributes the success of Northwest style to one factor: job hunger.

“While the rest of the American economy is going bad, the Seattle economy is not going so bad,” he says. “If you’re sitting in New Jersey or Connecticut or Massachusetts, you look longingly across at a place like Seattle with envy and hope. This is a part of the country that’s actually working.”

While Raban rejects the argument that Northwesterners are more humble and kind than people elsewhere, others believe the ascendancy of Seattle style reflects a longing for the considerate, non-materialistic attitude abundant in the region.

Santa Fe style--with its Georgia O’Keeffe wanna-bes and half-million-dollar adobe shacks--smacked of pretense and privilege; Seattle style is “down-home and unpretentious,” says A&M; Records’ Hirschman. “People in America are ready for a humble and honest view.”

Southwest style celebrated nouveau riches; Northwest style insists on inconspicuous consumption.

“When I was growing up in Tacoma, there was a lot of logging money around, but there was never a show of opulence,” says Graham, proprietor of the Crocodile Cafe, a popular Seattle hangout for grunge rockers. “Nobody had Rolls-Royces. People drove pickups.

“And it’s still that way today. This may sound like a hippie thing to say, but there really is this down-to-earth attitude Seattle has thrown out into the culture. If you go to New York or L.A., everything a person has is there to be seen.”

In contrast, Graham says, even the wealthiest grunge rockers “look like they’ve gone to the floor of their rooms and scrounged through the piles to find the appropriately dirty long johns and ripped-up Levi’s.”

Seattleites also are known for their politeness. (One cynic called it a “New Age, goody-two-shoes” outlook.) Nordstrom, which has 16 stores in Southern California, has built a kingdom out of the words “customer service,” a concept that boils down to clerks being nice to customers.

Even the murder mysteries penned in Washington state are nice. “Seattle mysteries tend not to be too bloody and violent,” says J. B. Dickey, floor manager for the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. “I wouldn’t say they’re polite, but they’re not excruciatingly hard-boiled.”

Political correctness--another version of niceness--also abounds. In Seattle, vagrants place their empty wine bottles in the correct recycling bin.

And when customers complained that the Starbucks logo, a two-tailed siren, looked too much like a mermaid with her fins spread suggestively, Starbucks obligingly redesigned its coffee cups and napkins so as not to appear sexist.

Now, you see more face, less fin.

While these are some of the traits that have made Northwest products and ideas appealing to the rest of the country, the image being sold in flannel shirts and quirky television shows naturally includes elements of fantasy.

“It’s all kind of sanitized and imaginary,” says film critic Mary Brennan, of the “perky, yuppie everyone-is-moving-to-Seattle” image being propagated.

“I go to see a film like ‘Singles,’ and I don’t see anyone in that film like the people I know here,” she says. “It is kind of glossy and superficial.”

Nonetheless, as superficial trends go, the country could do worse than a style that would have folks wrap a flannel shirt around their waists, bid a courteous “good day” to their neighbors, and head off for the nearest coffee bar for a date with a politically correct mermaid.