Walking home last week, I saw a junior high school girl lingering outside Urban Outfitters. She wasn't just one of the usual pack of Lolitas that hang outside my apartment building (itself seemingly homing ground for the ground-down Dolores Hazes - you know, the girls that were a lot cuter before Markley soft-serve and HardTail sweatpants. Clad in customary mini-skirt and cropped leggings, she was also wearing a T-shirt with a day-glo Alfons Mucha print and an oversized canvas totebag from Loop's Andy Warhol line. I'm pretty sure she had his Velvet Underground and Nico banana graphic hanging as a keychain, also.

Her presence was a bastardization of art nouveau and pop art - both forms already pop manipulations - at the same time. And the outfit didn't even match.

Pop art - along with op art - in fashion first jumped from the canvas to the cloth in the 1960s. Famously, the Bonwit Teller department store in New York used a number of Warhol paintings in a 1961 window display. Mucha's art nouveau, on the other hand, blossomed in the early 20th century. The Czech artist's lush, romantic illustrations reached greatest acclaim in advertisements. Interesting, non? Incredibly.

Go ahead. Borrow all you want. Splash Edie Sedgwick screen-test photos over a blank tunic and ape "Bieres de la Meuse" ads for various accessories. But recognize the inspiration.

What bothers me is that many people don't know where this art they're wearing comes from. They don't recognize that the doe-eyed beauty on their totebags is a Mucha muse, what exactly that yellow banana thing is, or why all these bright, meticulously dotted graphics are suddenly popular. And this Lichtenstein dude?

Right now, the image appropriation of the pop culture of fashion is fascinating because we've reached a level where we don't come up with new product, we simply recycle what has worked in the past. How can you fail with something that has already been made famous?

We craft the new popular culture out of the old, new commodity (clothing, accessories) out of old commercial art (art nouveau advertisements for biscuits and perfume). We're at a point that preteens - not usually the first-feeders in the fashion chain - are wearing popular culture on their shirts and sleeves, thanks to labels like Loop NYC, as well as Urban Outfitters and Target's house brands. The hipster trend of prints featuring the defined, neo-classical figures like Mucha's is noteworthy because the artist's high art style was mostly associated, much to his chagrin, with a low culture art form: the commercial advertisement.

I first came across Mucha in an impressive coffee-table volume on art nouveau. You've probably seen his work too, albeit unknowingly - maybe it's the JOB advertisement in your friend's apartment or a print of "Les Saisons" you saw at a poster store. His curvy, pre-Raphaelite women, lavish floral ornamentation and clean outlines are everywhere. Mucha's name is little known, but if you doubt his influence even now, take a closer look at the layout of concert posters (especially work by Hapshash and the Coloured Coat) next time you're at the record store.

Doesn't this knowledge make that overpriced "vintage" T-shirt even more attractive?

With Warhol, the recent proliferation of hot pink bovine prints and silk-screened flowers is due to Loop NYC. The company has an entire collection devoted to Warhol - approved by his estate - including a high-contrast Mao Tse-Tung sleep mask. But as aforementioned, this isn't the first time pop art has made the leap to fashion. During that era, the contrasting lines and colors of op art (short for optical art) also found its way onto mini-dresses and shifts. The fashion industry's adoption of Bridget Riley's art resulted in the artist filing a lawsuit in the '60s. What I love about pop art in today's fashion is that designers are marketing the products as kitsch. They see the kitschiness of Andy Warhol's soup cans stamped a dozen times on a messenger bag, or Roy Lichtenstein's magnified version of newspaper images. But these artists recognized and exploited the kitsch of everyday images - with the second go-round of these fashion items, these companies are producing kitsch-squared.

I have no problem with kitsch - I'm a lot more Tereza than Sabina than I care to admit. But if you're going to wear pop, know the culture behind it.

- Chou loves coffee-table art. E-mail her at kimberch@umich.edu.