HARRISBURG, Pa. – Caitlin Reeser, 15, of Palmyra, recently was eyeing an outfit at Maurice’s in the Lebanon Valley Mall. It featured this year’s popular layered look: Two tank tops atop one another covered by a cardigan, two necklaces, and the whole thing over jeans. It would reveal little skin.

Reeser called it “normal looking.”

“I think trends are more conservative,” she said. “I don’t see people with short shorts and skirts.”

Some more modest clothing is expected to be popular at school this fall, but fashion experts are divided as to whether it’s a real trend or a blip in the rise and fall of fashions.

Katie Wadhams, spokeswoman for Macy’s, said the layered look and leggings, both popular for the fall, mean kids naturally cover up more.

“I think it’s not so much that they’re going for the more modest look as that’s just the fashion this year,” she said.

At Rue 21 in the Hershey Outlets, Samantha Scheller, 16, of East Hanover Township, said she likes jeans with holes in them and strapless shirts. She was trying on some short, strapless baby doll dresses. She doesn’t see a trend toward more modesty, but she also said she doesn’t follow celebrity fashions.

“I just pick up what I like,” she said.

Her mother, Jeanine Schaffner, said she thinks some girls like to think of themselves as a little bit bad. Her daughter is a ballerina and has to be prim and proper and keep her hair in a bun, so she likes to let loose a little in her school clothes, she said.

“She has her dressy look, but sometimes she likes to go out of her natural element,” she said.

Several “bad girls,” such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, are no longer fashion trendsetters because they have been self-destructing over the past few months.

Allison Walsh, 12, of Fredericksburg, said she likes the way Hilary Duff dresses more – short dresses with a T-shirt underneath. It’s not as revealing as Spears, she said.

Walsh was shopping for denim, vintage T-shirts, hoodies, maybe a zip-up T-shirt.

Her mother, Christina, said she hopes the modesty trend lasts.

“I like the classic fit,” she said.

Maurice’s assistant manager, Victoria Blouch of Myerstown, graduated from high school in 2001; she said the clothing was much more revealing back then. She said girls are now looking to more modest dressers such as Katie Holmes, Scarlett Johansson and Gwen Stefani.

More stringent dress codes in schools also probably influence what students buy in the fall, Blouch said.

Mary Ann Smith, manager at Maurice’s, said many girls choose jeans over skirts because short skirts don’t meet their schools’ dress codes.

Lower Dauphin Middle School Assistant Principal Becky Davis said there are always “one or two who try to push the envelope,” but school officials have never had to send any students home.

“In some regards, it’s a little more modest” in the past year, she said. She’s very glad boys are no longer “wiggin’ it” – wearing their pants hanging off their bodies.

“That was such an obnoxious thing,” she said. “I don’t know how they moved. It was humorous watching them.”

But Blouch said she doesn’t think modesty is a lasting trend.

“Things have changed in the last couple of years, and they will change again,” she said.

Katelyn Strohecker, 18, a recent Cedar Cliff High School graduate who is heading for the Fashion Institute of Technology in the fall and likes dresses, said she applauds the more modest look and hopes it stays.

“Girls are starting to realize that guys don’t always like it when girls dress so sexy,” she said. If you dress more modestly, “people see you as more powerful and more confident, more like you’re in charge.”