Short Notes in Paris : Fashion: The spring 1991 ready-to-wear collections allow shapely woman over 40 to look good in briefer clothes.

Thierry Mugler has a motto: “Too much is just enough.” And he pushes it to the limit in his spring 1991 fashion collection. His show was the first to get people talking during a week of ready-to-wear collections that ends Wednesday.

With Madonna and Grace Jones in the audiences Thursday night, and with Diana Ross and Mick Jaggar’s daughter, Jade, modeling, Mugler’s newest styles had some tough competition.

But they were up to the challenge. Steel-tip bra tops, bikini pant suits, towering platform shoes, patent leather short shorts, stretch vinyl leggings and itsy-bitsy body suits are just the start of this over-the-top collection.

Celebrity models Lauren Hutton and Iman proved just how good these body grippers can look on women older than 40 who stay in shape.

Before the show, Mugler announced that he will launch his first new fragrance. Too bad he didn’t have a few bottles on hand to bribe his show’s security guards, who somehow managed to keep ticket-holders outside but let gate-crashers in. Even Mugler’s designer chum, Azzedine Alaia, didn’t make the cut.

This was the first of several fights to break out during fashion week. Another started Saturday at the Claude Montana show, when Elsa Klensch, whose cable television fashion show is a favorite among fashion buffs, found someone sitting in her assigned seat. The noisy exhibition tent fell silent as a security guard was called. Klensch and her adversary both refused to budge. Finally, an usher brought in an extra chair and set it up in the aisle. Klensch got her seat, the other woman moved to the new one.

That same day, New York magazine reporter Michael Gross made headlines in Women’s Wear Daily for having switched the seating chart at the John Galiano show earlier in the week.

Gross had moved his place card to the first row and moved WWD publisher John Fairchild’s back to row two. A story about it appeared on WWD’s gossip page. Headline: “Grossed Out.”

Montana’s show was one of the best so far. He showed satin evening dresses with asymmetric hems and silver hard wear that were perfect. An ivory-colored trench coat, short in front and long in back, has wide sashes at the cuff that prove glamorous and romantic at the same time. A series of beaded body suits with white linen skirts or shorts is the best answer of the season for day or night dressing. There was not one mistake or disappointment in this show.

Meantime, there were a few ideas basic to many collections. Body suits and leggings, short shorts and short dresses were the main ideas.

Yohji Yamamoto calls his little black slip dresses with the split skirts, “nighties for the ‘90s.” And they double as underwear.

His black body suits that extend to the knee are also a type of underwear, because he treats them as a first layer of clothing. Over some he puts white linen skirts or apron dresses suspended from strings reminiscent of clothesline; over others he puts open-weave dresses, nipped at the waist and worn several inches shorter than the body suit beneath that shows through like a graceful shadow.

Yamamoto’s female fashion counterpart, Rei Kawakubo for comme Des Garcons, who is also Japanese-born and Paris-based, shows ankle-grazing shift dresses in semi-sheer print fabric over red or blue body suits. Hers are more like jump suits; they don’t fit like a second skin.

Happily, the surreal details Kawakubo adds in most of her collections are not part of her new spring line. No sleeves dangling from skirts, no hoods suspended from bodices. This new direction is toward more wearable feminine fashion.

Karl Lagerfeld, first to lift leggings to haute couture status with his Chanel collections of last year, features leggings again this season in his own signature line.

They look newest when he puts them under sequined evening wear, especially his body-conscious T-shirt dresses, or open-back trapeze-shape tops and mini skirts. They are always thick, usually black or navy, Capri length and worn with the heel-less ankle boots that Lagerfeld uses throughout his spring collection.

Other current-minded looks for night are pastel print leggings cut to mid-calf, topped with multilayer shirts or tunics in sheer versions of the same print fabric. It is an energetic collection that blends Lagerfeld’s strong sense of street fashion with his sure-handed use of couture details.

Lagerfeld uses cycle shorts as suit bottoms to go with fitted jackets cut waist length in front, dipping longer in back.

Nino Cerruti builds pant suits from cycle shorts, too. He adds a tunic and long swing jacket. Jacqueline Jacobson, the Dorothee Bis designer, puts shorts under knee-baring trapeze dresses made of semi-sheer fabric so the shorts show through.

Mugler and Alaia had a chance to make up at the Jean Paul Gaultier show Friday night. They talked across the aisle to each other. (It’s not unusual for designers to attend each other’s shows in Paris, although in New York, it’s all-but-unheard of; somehow, in the Big Apple, it’s implied, you’re there to steal ideas, not show support.)

Romantic love was the theme at Gaultier’s show, attend by Madonna and Catherine Deneuve. There were rose pedals scattered on the floor, bird calls filled the air, and the first models were an Adam and Eve of the ‘90s. He wore sheer tights and a fig leaf, she wore a serpent bra.

Things got really rowdy after that. Clothes were modeled by couples or sometimes ambiguously related trios. Men wore wigs--black dreadlocks or pink Louis XIV styles. And they wore daffodil-yellow suits with matching cowboy-style neck kerchiefs, or sarong-skirted suits in men’s wear fabrics, an idea Gaultier has played with for years.

Women wore sarong skirts in men’s wear fabric, too--or men’s wear fabric jackets over ruffled cyclist shorts.

The ‘60s revival styles in the collection look right, updated with newer fabrics and shapes. White vinyl T-shirts and banker gray suits are winners.

Showpieces include a coat for romantic-minded career women, which was navy blue pin stripe to the waist with a burst of navy blue tulle from there to the floor. The clear vinyl matador’s jacket embroidered in gold and jewels was the men’s wear item of flamboyant choice.

“We have sold four of them at $10,000 each and we don’t even have them in the store yet, only photographs,” said Barbara Weiser after the Gaultier show. Weiser, an owner of Charivari, the New York boutique chain, and other retailers visiting Paris admit to being worried.

Recession talk has them debating whether to stock up on classic clothes with long-wearing life spans or choose the more extraordinary items.

“Not everyone wants classic clothes, cutting-edge avant garde is what goes with some peoples’ personality,” said Tommy Perse, who owns Maxfield in Los Angeles, with his wife, Ann Marie. Maxfield will carry a certain amount of modern classic clothing, Perse said. But more than that, he added, “We’re looking for the new.”

Joan Kaner, senior vice president and fashion director of Nieman Marcus, said, “We’ll buy the show pieces,” then added, “We’re likely to cut back and buy less.”

Kal Ruttenstein of Bloomingdales said, “I need impulse buys at $1,500. The economy is frightening, but to buy classics for our customers doesn’t work. They want fashion.”

At the Issey Miyake show, there was some of both. Classic Miyake are shaped dresses in tiny-pleat fabric. This time, the sleeves are shaped like question marks until the wearer pushes them up, to find that they wrap and pleat around the arm like modern sculpture. The “dinosaur” jacket of wire-framed fabric has an armor-plate appearance. It folds into a reptile shape you can put on the coffee table.

Black rubber tank tops, ruffled body suits teamed with vests made entirely of canvas pouches, and a honeycomb evening outfit that Miyake compares to ribbon, established the designer’s unique vision. Yet the clothes in this collection are completely wearable.

“Certainly there is a recession,” Miyake said after his show.

“You see it all over the world. And yes, store owners are worried. But I am a designer, my duty is to show what is contemporary and what is the future. If designers look back, we get left behind.”