Now rehearsing for her role in the...

Now rehearsing for her role in the Broadway revival of “Singing in the Rain,” Faye Grant says she adores antique clothes. So for her wedding two Sundays ago to New York actor Stephen Holland, Grant bought a 125-year-old lace tea dress at a SoHo vintage clothing store. “The dress held up fine through the wedding ceremony,” says the actress who starred in the TV series “V.” But later at the reception, she reports, it began to disintegrate. “The more I danced, the more it shredded. And when the reception was finished, so was the dress.”

We were wondering what a literary lion would wear for a stroll on the Venice boardwalk, so we took ourselves out and found E. L. Doctorow near the corner of Speedway and Market Street. He looked a tad overdressed in his beige silk sport jacket. But he explained by saying he was in the neighborhood to read one of his stories. It was part of a program at the 72 Market Street restaurant, with George Plimpton, T. Coraghessan Boyle (one of the local literati) and a hundred supporters of the Paris Review arts magazine, which is celebrating its 30th birthday. Tony Bill, who co-owns the restaurant, tells us that this meeting could be the first of others to come.

The good doctors and nurses of “General Hospital”--the daytime soap--won’t look like their usual selves Saturday when they trade in their greens, their whites and their candy stripes for sequins, snakeskins and silver lame. Twelve actresses from the show are modeling clothes by glitter goddess Ellene Warren at a fashion show for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation at the Sheraton Premiere hotel. Warren says “Dr.” Leslie Charleson, who’ll hostess the event, will model a silver lame snakeskin tuxedo and rhinestone-studded bustier. It’s a shining contrast to the gabardine slacks and tailored blazer Charleson has been wearing to fittings at Warren’s Melrose Avenue shop.

Can you bottle nastiness? The folks behind “Dallas” think so. They will be launching two “Dallas” scents, called Southfork Woman and Southfork Man, next month in Nice, France. Danny Simon, vice president of Lorimar Licensing Co., reports that when he met with perfumers in the world’s perfume capital, Grasse, France, they asked him what the essence of “Dallas” was. And the answer, of course, was “J.R.” So, the men’s cologne smells “tough,” Simon says, and the women’s perfume smells just like the women of “Dallas”: alluring and sophisticated.

Vinh Pham has won the second annual More Fashion Award as most promising new designer of the year. The 22-year-old Vietnamese refugee, who now lives in New York, picked up his trophy Monday night in Manhattan’s Hotel Pierre after judges Carolina Herrera, Mary McFadden, Giorgio Sant’Angelo, Willi Smith and Michaele Vollbracht selected him from among the group of 10 finalists. The 1983 Parsons School of Design graduate has been in business 18 months, and his clothes are sold at Neiman-Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and small specialty stores. Among the final 10 were the L.A. design team of Antony Moorcroft and John Murrough, who own the T. J. Boys company.

Add this to the fashion lexicon. Vidiot is designer Jeffrey Banks’ new word to describe video idiots. And we’d swear they’re all in New York this week for the fall collections. What’s a vidiot? Banks defines it as a creature hell-bent on videotaping a big-name designer’s fashion show to sell for fun and profit.