By DAVID SEGAL


PALM BEACH, Florida - Long before the number was redolent of bailouts and bank failure, David Neff decided that Trillion was the perfect name for his clothing store here on Worth Avenue, this town’s boulevard of luxury retail.

The idea was to brace customers for the astronomical price tags - $6,800 for a sport jacket, $800 for a button- down shirt - and to convey unparalleled opulence.

“We wanted people to know that this is a lot,”Mr. Neff says, gesturing to the clothing,“and we didn’t want anyone to open next door with a store that sounded like it might be more.”

Until last year, this idea actually seemed reasonable. Then the meltdown vaporized the portfolios of multimillionaires here and, soon after, a beloved Wall Street wizard and Palm Beach home owner named Bernie Madoff was unmasked as a fraud.

For years, Mr. Madoff’s genius act beguiled his Jewish neighbors, as well as friends of those neighbors, and so on, until vast chunks of money vanished into his Ponzi scheme. Life savings, dreams and inheritances, gone.

“A guy stood right there and cried,”says Mr. Neff, pointing at a table covered with $800 cashmere sweaters.“And he told me he’d lost it all, his wife lost it all, his daughter lost it all. He said to me,‘I had everything with Bernie.’”

Palm Beach has just 10,200 residents on a land mass that is not quite three times the size of New York’s Central Park. It’s so packed with wealth that the joke here is that calling someone a“millionaire”is an insult.

Given the density, given the roughly 20 percent decline in the value of real estate since the housing bust, and given the concussive impact of Mr. Madoff, Palm Beach might well have this dubious distinction: the net worth of the average resident here has plunged, in absolute terms, by more than the average net worth of residents in any other town or city in the United States.

Of course, when your $50 million is cut to a third, you’ve lost a lot of money but you’re still rich by any sane standard. And real estate agents say they don’t know of any foreclosures here.

Linked to the world by three bridges, Palm Beach is an island that feels like one large gated community. It’s roughly 21 kilometers long and about four blocks wide.

The ravages of the last year aren’t immediately obvious when driving around the perfectly kept residential streets here. But that’s in part because Palm Beach regulates the size of forsale signs, which can’t be larger than a CD case. And once you’ve learned to spot these mini-placards, you see them all over. More than 260 single-family homes are on the market - starting at $700,000, and on up to $72.5 million - which is more inventory than anyone in the business can remember.

More noticeable are the empty storefronts, which have started appearing even on Worth Avenue, the home of a Saks Fifth Avenue, a Chanel and an Hermes, to name just a few.

In Trillion, a lot of regular customers haven’t been seen since Hurricane Madoff struck in December - including, of course, Mr. Madoff himself.

The last time he was here, he became enamored of a $2,000 pair of worsted spun cashmere pants, which had to be ordered from Italy. After the slacks arrived, but before Mr. Madoff could come by for a fitting, he was arrested.

“I remember I heard about the arrest and I went directly to the store to charge those pants on his credit card,”recalls Mr. Neff. “But the card had already been canceled.”

So, what happened to the pants?“They’re in the racks,”Mr. Neff says, nodding toward the trouser section,“over there.”

Barclay Walsh contributed reporting.